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Youth leisure careers duringpost‐communist transitions in the SouthCaucasusKen Roberts a , Gary Pollock b , Jochen Tholen c & LevanTarkhnishvili da School of Sociology and Social Policy , University of Liverpool ,Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, L697ZA, UKb Manchester Metropolitan University , Manchester, UKc University of Bremen , Bremen, Germanyd BCG , Tbilisi, GeorgiaPublished online: 06 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Ken Roberts , Gary Pollock , Jochen Tholen & Levan Tarkhnishvili (2009) Youthleisure careers during post‐communist transitions in the South Caucasus, Leisure Studies, 28:3,261-277, DOI: 10.1080/02614360902951666

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Leisure StudiesVol. 28, No. 3, July 2009, 261–277

ISSN 0261-4367 print/ISSN 1466-4496 online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/02614360902951666http://www.informaworld.com

Youth leisure careers during post-communist transitions in the South Caucasus

Ken Robertsa*, Gary Pollockb, Jochen Tholenc and Levan Tarkhnishvilid

aSchool of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, UK; bManchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK; cUniversity of Bremen, Bremen, Germany; dBCG, Tbilisi, GeorgiaTaylor and FrancisRLST_A_395338.sgm(Received 12 August 2008; final version received 12 February 2009)10.1080/02614360902951666Leisure Studies0261-4367 (print)/1466-4496 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis0000000002009Professor KenRobertsbert@liverpool.ac.uk

This paper reports findings from interview surveys with 1215 respondents, splitbetween the capital cities (Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi) and one non-capital region(Kotayk, Aran-Mugan and Shida Kartli) in each of the three South Caucasuscountries – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The respondents, who were drawnfrom households in larger representative household social surveys, were all bornbetween 1970 and 1976 and were aged 31–37 at the time of the fieldwork in 2007.Their life stage transitions from childhood to adulthood had roughly coincidedwith their countries’ transitions from communism to post-communism. Data wascollected on the samples’ participation in selected leisure activities from age 16 to30. Similar data was collected on the samples’ careers in education, the labourmarket, housing and family relationships. This information enables us to identifytypical leisure careers and how their development was affected by events in otherlife domains, all in the context of the macro-changes that were in process in eachof the research locations. The evidence enables both personal leisure careers andaggregate leisure trends in different socio-demographic groups to be identifiedThis shows that changes in leisure behaviour between age 16 and 30 were neitherwidening nor narrowing the differences between the leisure of males and females,or those who married and became parents on the one hand, then, on the other,those who were still single and childless at age 30. In contrast, differences byplace, and by social class, grew progressively wider, thus raising the social costsof geographical and social mobility. Changes in leisure behaviour between age 16and 30 were separating young adults into those who participated in little, if any,structured out-of-home leisure, whose main leisure spending, if any, was onalcohol and tobacco (typically consumed in homes and neighbourhoods), andthose whose leisure was characterised by relatively high and sustainedparticipation in sport, consumption of high culture, and going out to bars, cafes,cinema, discos, etc.

Keywords: leisure; ageing; youth

Introduction

This paper explores the benefits, and the difficulties, in injecting a longitudinal,biographical dimension into studies of young people’s leisure. This dimension is typi-cally absent (the exceptions include Hendry, Shucksmith, Love, & Glendinning, 1993;Hendry et al., 2002; MacDonald & Shildrick, 2007). Investigators typically collect

*Corresponding author. Email: bert@liverpool.ac.uk

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cross-sectional data and compare participation rates in different leisure activities,purchasing patterns and sub-cultural affiliations (if any) in different socio-demographicgroups. When a longitudinal dimension has been present the topic has most likely beena single type of leisure such as sport participation (where researchers and policy-makersare interested in the extent and causes of, and ways of preventing drop-out), and druguse (which policy-makers seek to minimise or prevent) (see, e.g. Parker, Williams, &Aldridge, 2002; Roberts & Brodie, 1992; Roberts, Minten, Chadwick, Lamb, & Brodie,1991). A longitudinal dimension is implicit if not explicit in the policy-relevant ‘theory’(usually lacking sound evidence) which suggests that involvement in ‘good’ leisure willkeep young people in school, out of crime, and set them en route towards included ratherthan socially excluded adulthoods (see Merino, 2007). In Britain in recent decades thistheory appears to have worked (in the sense of making a marginal but significant collec-tive difference to long-term biographies) in respect of participation in sport, the arts,religious and community groups, but not with youth clubs which (for unknown reasons)have raised participants’ long-term risks of social exclusion (see Feinstein, Bynner, &Duckworth, 2005; Robson, 2003).

A longitudinal dimension is likely to enhance our understanding of young people’sleisure if only because we know that young people’s scenes are finely age graded.‘Mature’ 16/17-year olds do not wish to hang around with 13/14-year-old ‘kids’,while 19/20-year-old young adults do not seek membership of crowds dominated bythe 16- and 17-year olds. Also, we know that young people’s leisure is chronicallyunstable, more so than the leisure of any other age group. Young people are theexperimenters and dabblers. They take-up and drop activities in quick succession.Thereafter, in adulthood, leisure tastes and behaviour tend to stabilise. Childhood andyouth are the life stages when individuals build up leisure capital (tastes, skills andinterests) on which they then base the rest of their leisure lives (see McGuire,Dottavio, & O’Leary, 1987; Roberts, 2006; Scott & Willits, 1989). Authenticityrequires that change be somehow captured in portraits of young people’s leisure.

The benefits of a longitudinal dimension are potentially enormous in terms of bothpure theory building and extracting policy implications. Do social class, gender andethnic differences in leisure behaviour widen or narrow as individuals progressthrough youth? To put this another way, how, if at all, does leisure contribute to anyprogressive widening or narrowing of social divisions between the sexes, ethnicgroups and social classes? Concern that young people do too little of some things (likeplaying sport) and too much of others (like drugs, TV, internet, alcohol) will clearlyhave firmer roots if these behaviour patterns tend to persist than if they are merelyfleeting, mini-life stage phenomena. Sociologists, especially those making the culturalturn, have devoted much effort to deconstructing young people’s styles of dress andmusical tastes, and the identities associated with the purchase of particular holidays,trainers, jeans, etc. (see Hebdige, 1979; Miles, 2000; Tanner, Asbridge, & Wortley,2008). The significance of the identities and deconstructions will clearly depend onfor how long teenagers and young adults retain the affiliations.

Evidence

This paper is not seeking substantive generalisable conclusions let alone claiming toidentify the changes in leisure behaviour that occur as individuals progress from child-hood to adulthood. The aims are partly to describe how the leisure of young peoplechanged during the historical post-communist transformations of the three South

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Caucasus countries, and also methodological: to explore how to introduce a longitu-dinal dimension while scanning a wide segment if not the whole of leisure, and howto analyse the relevant data. Here we simply illustrate the types of findings that can beproduced, and their theoretical and practical value.

Our evidence is specific to young people in specific places over a specific histor-ical period. In 2007, we interviewed representative samples totalling 1215 31–37-yearolds in the capital city and a comparator region in each of the three South Caucasuscountries: Yerevan and Kotayk in Armenia, Baku and Aran-Mugan in Azerbaijan andTbilisi and Shida Kartli in Georgia. The respondents were a sub-sample from the 2005Data Initiative Survey (see Caucasus Research Resource Centre, 2005), which wasbased on representative samples of households in the same cities and comparatorregions. The target group in the 2007 fieldwork comprised all members of the house-holds who were born between 1970 and 1976, and who were therefore aged 31–37when interviewed in 2007. The achieved samples (approximately 200 per location)were those who in 2007 were still at the same addresses as in 2005 (around 70% alto-gether were still co-resident with their parents or parents-in-law when interviewed), orwho had moved locally and could be traced, and who were able and willing to takepart. We have no information about out-migrants from the locations who had settledelsewhere, but the samples contained within-country migrants (especially in the capi-tal cities), and ‘pendulum migrants’ who had returned after spells working abroad.

All the respondents had reached age 16 at some time between 1986 and 1992, sotheir transitions to adulthood had coincided with the end of communism, their coun-tries becoming independent states, and the post-communist histories of the countries.The aim of the research was to trace how the lives of different groups of youngpeople in the three countries had been affected by these historical changes. Thesamples were from specific places rather than nationally representative for theoreticalreasons rather than on grounds of cost or other practicalities. Most people live in localplaces, and their opportunities in education, the labour market and at leisure dependless on any national picture than whatever is available close to where they live. Linksbetween trends in and levels of employment and unemployment, and income levels,on the one hand, and uses of leisure on the other, need to be explored within locallabour markets, etc. National pictures are always aggregates of different, sometimeshugely different, local situations. Patterns and levels of leisure participation willalways be most responsive to local economic conditions and leisure provisions. Suchlinks are most easily identified within the territories within which most lives arelived.

A reason why our evidence should be of global interest, rather than relevant onlyin the South Caucasus, is that the historical changes that had occurred during oursamples’ life stage transitions to adulthood were among the most dramatic changes thathave ever occurred in any modern societies. All the South Caucasus countries becameofficially independent, and officially post-communist, in 1991 (when Russia declareditself independent, and Soviet republics that had not already done so quickly followedsuite). Change had already begun under Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (freedom ofexpression) and perestroika (reform). Private businesses were already operating, andpolitical movements outside the Communist Party had been created. However, it wasthe abrupt end of the Soviet-wide system of economic planning that ripped a half,sometimes more, out of the economies of all the former Soviet countries. The SouthCaucasus’s economic problems were exacerbated by warfare: between Armenia andAzerbaijan over the status of Nagorno Karabakh (a region of Azerbaijan with a mainly

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Armenian population), and when South Ossetia and Abkhazia successfully fought forindependence from Georgia. Landlocked Armenia’s transformation problems arrivedon top of the effects of a devastating earthquake in 1988, and were further complicatedby an economic blockade imposed by all its Muslim neighbours (Azerbaijan, and Iranand Turkey who were supporting Azerbaijan). The local wars created around a quarterof a million displaced persons in both Georgia (from South Ossetia and Abkhazia) andArmenia (from Azerbaijan), and around three-quarters of a million in Azerbaijan (fromNagorno Karabakh and its surrounding territories). Economic and living conditionsthroughout the region were dire. Water and electricity supplies were intermittent.Georgia and Armenia both lost around a fifth of their populations through outwardmigration. Then, at some point after 1995, the economies of all three countries startedto recover, and growth rates of around 10% year-on-year were recorded (officially)until the region was affected by the world recession in 2008.

Thus we expected our young people’s biographies to bear the imprint, first, of thedeterioration in conditions in the early 1990s, and then the subsequent recoveries. Asregards leisure, we expected participation rates in out-of-home leisure to havedeclined in the early 1990s when the youth organisations that had formerly providedmost organised leisure activities (Pioneers and Komsomol) simply disappeared, whenthe governments had no cash to pay salaries let alone maintain leisure facilities suchas swimming pools and theatres, in countries where genuinely voluntary associationshad no recent history, when households’ savings were eliminated in bouts of hyper-inflation, and households’ real incomes shrivelled. Then, from the late 1990s onwards,we expected levels of leisure participation to have benefitted from the countries’sustained economic recoveries.

As explained below, we found no (or hardly any) such effects, and this is aninstance where negative findings are highly significant. Our evidence shows that itwas life course changes, not historical change, that had driven changes in our samples’leisure as they grew from childhood into adulthood. This was despite the dramaticcharacter of the historical changes that had taken place.

The questionnaire, modelled initially on instruments used in the British HouseholdPanel Survey, gathered information about respondents’ careers in education, thelabour market, housing and family relationships from age 16 up to the present, whichmeans that we collected complete information about everyone’s life from age 16 to atleast 30. There was also a battery of questions that asked respondents about theirfrequency of participation (on a six point scale, with a range from never to every day)in 13 different kinds of out-of-home leisure during each year of their lives from age16 onwards. The 13 activities were:

(1) Playing sport, including physical exercise.(2) Going to pubs, cafes and restaurants.(3) Going to discos, nightclubs.(4) Going to the cinema.(5) Going to pop and rock concerts.(6) Going to classical concerts, opera and ballet.(7) Going to the theatre.(8) Going to museums, art galleries.(9) Watching sport (not on TV).(10) Smoking cigarettes.(11) Drinking strong alcoholic drinks (brandy, vodka, etc.).

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(12) Drinking less strong alcoholic drinks (beer, wine, etc.).(13) Taking part in religious services.

We acknowledge that these activities do not cover the whole of leisure (nothing aboutTV, the internet, listening to music, hanging about with friends, doing nothing). Wefocused on the uses of leisure that seemed most likely to be affected by the historicalchanges in the countries, and in respect of which we believed that respondents weremost likely to be able to recall whether they had taken part earlier in their lives. Wealso recognise that some of the activities on our list are very broad types of leisure.For instance, playing sport could be expanded to list numerous different sports, andthis expansion would almost certainly have boosted the overall recorded participationrates. We also realise that respondents would have found it difficult to recall accu-rately what they were doing, and how often, up to 20 years previously. In analysingour evidence we have therefore divided respondents simply into those who said thatthey had ‘ever’ and ‘never’ taken part in different leisure activities at different ages.We presumed (though of course we cannot prove) that respondents were more likelyto be able to recall whether they had ‘ever’ done things than, if so, exactly how often.As explained below, in this and other respects our evidence illustrates the challengesthat have to be addressed and the compromises that become inevitable in injecting alongitudinal dimension into the study of the leisure of young people or, indeed, anyother section of the population.

Achieving longitudinality

There are three ways of introducing a longitudinal dimension into leisure research (orany other kind of survey-based research). One is the multi cross-sectional approach inwhich a sample, say from age 16 to 30, could be questioned about their current leisureactivities. Recall problems are present, but are minimised with this approach. Overallparticipation rates in different activities can be calculated for each age. This allowsoverall trends with age to be mapped, but only at the aggregate level. Sport participa-tion may be shown to decline by 10% between age 20 and 25 but there is no way oftelling whether this is due to 10% of the population lapsing, or 40% lapsing whilethree-quarters of that number shift from inactivity to sport activity. In other words, themethod will not allow personal leisure careers to be identified.

The second approach is the panel study in which respondents initially aged 16might be followed-up to age 30, and questioned annually about their participation indifferent leisure activities. Again, recall problems are minimised, and in this casechanges at both the aggregate and individual levels can be plotted. The problem withpanels, of course, is that it can take a long time for the research to yield full results,and research funders will rarely countenance projects with a planned life in excess of10 years. Another limitation is that unless research commenced at or prior to a partic-ular time, it becomes impossible to study the effects of particular historical changes,such as the transition from communism.

The third approach, the one used in the research that we are reporting, is the retro-spective method. There are serious recall problems, of which we shall remain mindful,but this approach can yield fast results which appear realistic, particularly for struc-tured, time-bounded leisure activities (see Hedges, 1986), and can plot both individualand aggregate changes. Another advantage is that this approach avoids biases due tosample attrition (which plague panel studies), and it also avoids the complications that

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historical change can inject into cross-sectional snapshots covering successive agegroups. Put simply, the situations of present-day 30-year olds when they were 16 maynot be identical to the circumstances of present-day 16-year olds. Also, our retrospec-tive approach avoids biases that migration can introduce into any other kind of longi-tudinal study. As explained earlier, the countries in this research had lost (throughoutward migration) substantial proportions of their populations in the early 1990s.This would have seriously biased a panel study, whereas our profiles of the lives of16-, 23- and 30-year olds are from exactly the same persons.

Measuring change over time

We have already acknowledged that the 13 leisure activities about which data wascollected do not exhaust the whole of leisure, and also that the broad categories couldeasily be broken-up into more specific activities (types of sport, pop concerts, etc.)However, as we now demonstrate, a point to bear in mind is that the greater the detailthat is collected, the more will be at risk once analysis begins. We gathered informa-tion about 13 activities, with frequencies of participation measured on a six point scalefor every year of each respondent’s life from age 16 onwards (though here weconsider only data relating to ages up to 30). Thirteen activities, with six possiblefrequencies for each, instantly produce nearly 12 billion possible profiles for eachsingle year, and trillions over a 15-year period. Simplification is unavoidable.

Our first step was to convert the frequencies (daily, several times a week, etc.) intoa metric scale from 0 (never) to 1 (every day). Our second step was to factor analyse the13 activities in order to reduce them to a more manageable number. Four factors wereidentified (activities which tended to be done in any given year by the same individuals).

(1) Sport (playing and watching).(2) Drinking and smoking.(3) Going out (discos and nightclubs, cinema, pop and rock concerts, pubs, cafes

and restaurants).(4) High culture (classical concerts, opera and ballet, theatre, art galleries and

museums).(5) This left ‘religion’ which was not part of any wider factor.

Third, in order to produce a limited (simplified) number of profiles of change overtime, we divided the age range 16–30 into three five-year blocks (16–20, 21–25 and26–30). We can thereby distinguish, for each of the four leisure factors plus religion,individuals who never took part from age 16 to 30, those whose participation rate wasunchanged throughout, increasers and decreasers. This leaves a (very small) ‘other’category where there had been upward and downward movements.

Fourth, by combining each respondent’s careers on the four leisure factors plusreligion, we are able to divide the sample into overall increasers, decreasers, and thosewhose overall levels of leisure participation (on the types of leisure that we measured)were unchanged from age 16 to 30.

Collective trends

The evidence gathered in this research, and its analysis, have been complicated. Someof the main findings, in contrast, are startling in their simplicity. The overall trends

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with age across the combined samples from the six locations were to increase drinkingand smoking, and attendance at religious services, and to reduce levels of going out,sport and consumption of high culture. In total, there were more overall leisuredecreasers than increasers from age 16 to 30.

Identifying an overall pattern of change is not surprising. It is inevitable that therewould be such a pattern. What is more impressive is that the trends over time betweenage 16 and 30 had been exactly the same in all sub-groups, however the samples weredivided – by gender, place, education, parental socio-economic status, family forma-tion (marrying, becoming a parent). There were major differences in levels of partic-ipation at all ages depending on variables such as those just listed, but whatever thestarting levels (at age 16) and the end levels (at age 30), the trends had been identical.The solitary exception is that the younger respondents – those born between 1974 and1976 compared with those born between 1970 and 1973 – had more overall leisureincreasers than decreasers in their leisure careers.

There are always two possible explanations of changes in behaviour over time.The changes could be historical (period effects) or they could be age effects. We cancheck whether historical changes in young people’s leisure were in process bycomparing the two birth cohorts identified above. We can be sure that much of thechange in leisure behaviour recorded in the surveys is an age effect because exactlythe same trends over time are present within both cohorts. However, there are differ-ences between the cohorts indicating that some historical changes in young people’sleisure behaviour were in process (see Table 1). The inter-cohort differences do notindicate substantial change, but we need to bear in mind that the cohorts in questionwere not widely spaced. Fewer of the younger cohort had decreased their involvementin sport, but more of this same younger cohort had never been involved in sport at all.With drinking and smoking the inter-cohort differences are slender. With high culture,like sport, the younger respondents were less likely to be reducers, but they were alsomore likely to have never been involved. With religion there was very little difference.The main difference is that the younger cohort had been less likely to reduce theirgoing out, which is why there were more overall leisure increasers and fewer decreas-ers among the younger respondents.

A key finding is that neither cohort, nor the samples when aggregated, had the dipin leisure participation in the early 1990s, or the subsequent rise, that might well havebeen expected given the countries’ histories (as described above).

Personal leisure careers

Earlier we pointed out that aggregate trends may be the sum of several actual trends,each concentrated within a particular section of a population, a sub-culture. In ourresearch the young adults who were most likely to increase their drinking and smokingbetween age 16 and 30 were not necessarily the same individuals, or from the samesocial groups, that were the most likely to increase their attendance at religiousservices. Likewise those who reduced their going out were not necessarily the sameindividuals who reduced their consumption of high culture.

From our biographical data we can plot changes in leisure behaviour at the indi-vidual level, but merely describing and comparing individuals’ leisure careers requiresfurther simplification of our evidence. We have already seen that four factors could beidentified among the 13 leisure activities about which the samples were questioned.These were activities that tended to be done at the same time (in the same year) by the

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same persons. Religion stood apart from the four multi-activity factors that were iden-tified and measured.

We now pose a different question. Were individuals who increased or decreasedtheir involvement in any of these types of leisure (the four factors plus religion)between age 16 and 30 more likely than other young people to increase or decreasetheir involvement in all the others? In other words, was there a general tendency to bean increaser or a decreaser, or to stay constant in one’s leisure practices?

Table 1. Cohort comparisons (in percentages).

Born 1970–1973 Born 1974–1976

SportNever 53 58Decreased 36 29No change 4 6Increased 4 5Other 3 2

High cultureNever 60 67Decreased 24 18No change 8 5Increased 5 7Other 3 3

Going outNever 29 36Decreased 45 30No change 7 9Increased 11 19Other 8 6

Drinking and smokingNever 33 34Decreased 6 5No change 18 20Increased 41 38Other 3 3

ReligionNever 41 46Decreased 4 4No change 37 32Increased 15 18Other 3 1

OverallDecline 44 29No change 31 40Increase 25 31N 643 571

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Leisure Studies 269

We find, first, that there was a general tendency ‘never’ to take part in activi-ties. So individuals who never took part in sport (watching or playing), or drinkingand smoking, were more likely than other respondents to have never taken part inall the other kinds of leisure. Therefore each individual could be given a score(from 0 to 5) depending on how many of the five types of activities (the fourfactors plus religion) he or she had never practised. Of course, every person had todo something in his or her free time. Those who appear inactive on our measure-ments were inactive in structured, out-of-home activities, plus drinking and smok-ing. We can infer that they must have been spending their spare time on lessstructured, and less expensive practices, like watching television, and just ‘hangingaround’. In the following analysis we split the sample into groups with relativelyhigh and relatively low overall levels of leisure activity from age 16 to 30 accord-ing to whether they scored less than three, or three or more, out of the five possible‘nevers’.

When individuals had participated in any of the kinds of leisure that we measured,increases and decreases in some, but not all, of the types of activity had tended tohappen alongside increases or decreases in others. Participation in the going out, sportand high culture factors tended to have risen or declined in unison. In contrast,changes over time in religious participation, and in drinking and smoking, were unre-lated to changes in any other kinds of leisure. In the following analysis we splitmembers of the samples who had ever participated according to whether they hadmaintained or increased at least two from our ‘going out’, ‘sport’ and ‘high culture’leisure factors. We also split the samples according to whether or not they hadincreased their smoking and drinking, and religious participation, between age 16 and30. Combining these measurements gives 16 possible mixtures, but 79% of respon-dents’ personal leisure careers fell into just six, which are listed in Table 2.

A quarter of the combined samples had low overall levels of leisure activity, anddid not score positively on any of our other measurements. As regards structured, out-of-home leisure, they really did appear to have done nothing. Another 10% were iden-tical except that they had increased their drinking and smoking between age 16 and30. Among those with higher overall levels of leisure activity, 13% had failed to main-tain or increase their involvement in two from going out, sport and high culture, andhad not increased their religious participation or their drinking and smoking. Another11% had identical profiles saved for having increased their drinking and smoking.This left just 20% of the combined samples who had increased or maintained at least

Table 2. Main personal leisure careers.

Overall level of leisure activity

Maintained or increased at least two of ‘going out’, ‘sport’ and ‘high culture’

Increased ‘drinking and

smoking’Increased religious

participation

1. Relatively low No No No 25%2. Relatively low No Yes No 10%3. Relatively high No No No 13%4. Relatively high No Yes No 11%5. Relatively high Yes No No 11%6. Relatively high Yes Yes No 9%Total 79%

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270 K. Roberts et al.

two from going out, sport and high culture, either with or without also havingincreased their drinking and smoking.

Increased religious participation does not feature in any these main personalleisure careers. The religious increasers were scattered across all six personal leisureprofiles. They were more likely than the typical respondent to have relatively highlevels of overall leisure activity, were more likely to have increased their drinking andsmoking, but were also more likely to have reduced their going out, participation insport and consumption of high culture. Increased religious participation was not partof any single overall personal leisure profile. In this, as well as in other senses (notbelonging to any leisure ‘factor’, as described above) it stood apart.

Our identification of personal leisure profiles suggests that there were just twomajor leisure sub-cultures that involved young people in the South Caucasus, and thatthe vast majority of young people became increasingly involved in one or the otherbetween age 16 and 30. One of these sub-cultures was characterised by doing littleexcept possibly drinking and smoking, not in bars or cafes (which were part of our‘going out’ factor), but, by implication, in homes or neighbourhoods (personal leisurecareer types 1–4). The other major sub-culture was characterised by relatively highand maintained or rising levels of going out, participation in sport, and consumptionof high culture, with or without also smoking and drinking (personal leisure careertypes 5 and 6).

Youth leisure careers in different socio-demographic groups

Which groups of young people had experienced each of the above personal leisurecareers? Tables 3–8 compare the following groups:

(1) Cohorts: those born between 1970 and 1973, and those born between 1974 and1976 (Table 3).

(2) Males and females (Table 4).(3) According to progress in family formation, indicated by whether or not

respondents had become parents at age 30 (Table 4).(4) Family socio-economic status (SES), with up to four points awarded according

to whether respondents’ mothers and fathers had graduated from higher educa-tion, and whether the parents’ normal occupations had been management orprofessional. The resultant 0–4 point scale has been collapsed into lower,intermediate and higher SES groups (Table 5).

(5) Education, according to whether respondents had progressed into highereducation and gained a BA, equivalent or higher qualification (Table 6).

(6) Labour market careers, where respondents are grouped according to whether,between age 16 and 30, at least 50% of their time outside full-time educationhad been spent in non-manual employment, other kinds of employment, self-employment, unemployment or inactivity. Ninety-four percent of respondents’labour market careers could be placed in one of these groups (Table 7).

(7) Place (Table 8).

Cohort

Differences between the leisure careers of our two birth cohorts (already summarisedin Table 1, above, and see also Table 3) look modest compared with the contrasts in

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Table 3. Personal leisure careers by birth cohort (in percentages).

Personal leisure career 1970–1973 1974–1976

1 24 262 10 103 14 124 13 85 12 116 7 10Other 20 24

Table 4. Personal leisure careers by gender (in percentages).

Personal leisure career Males Females

No child at age 30

At least one child at age 30

1 15 32 26 242 19 4 14 83 9 16 10 144 15 8 7 135 9 13 11 126 12 6 10 8Other 21 22 22 22

Table 5. Personal leisure careers by parental SES (in percentages).

Personal leisure career Lower Intermediate Higher

1 29 24 112 12 10 43 12 12 174 11 12 95 7 13 216 7 9 14Other 22 21 24

Table 6. Personal leisure careers by education (in percentages).

Personal leisure career Higher education Other

1 11 322 4 133 19 104 14 95 20 76 8 9Other 21 24

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272 K. Roberts et al.

Tables 4–8. The younger cohort were the more likely to have maintained or increasedtheir participation in going out, sport and high culture, but only marginally, and theyounger respondents were also marginally the more likely to have never beeninvolved in three or more out of the five types of leisure activity that we measured(36% against 34%). We conclude that the main changes over time in our respondents’leisure had been age effects rather than indicative of historical changes. To repeat, thisis a truly important finding, given the immensity of the historical changes that hadoccurred during the samples’ transitions to adulthood.

Gender and family formation

The main difference between the sex changes in leisure behaviour from age 16 to 30is that the males had been much more likely than females to increase their drinkingand smoking. There was hardly any difference in the sexes’ likelihood of having main-tained or increased their involvement in sport, going out and consumption of highculture.

Progress in family formation was having no clear leisure consequences. Therewere fewer ‘nevers’ among the respondents who had become parents than amongthose who were still single and childless at age 30. Remaining a singleton was associ-ated with leisure inactivity, and the singletons were no more likely than those whomarried and became parents before age 30 to maintain or increase their involvementin the structured forms of leisure in which they did take part. This is another poten-tially significant finding. Marriage and parenthood had not depressed respondents’

Table 7. Personal leisure careers by career groups age 16–30 (in percentages).

Personal leisure career

Non-manual employment

Other employment Self-employment Unemployment Inactive

1 15 17 21 28 332 5 10 20 8 133 13 8 12 17 84 11 18 15 12 45 18 13 6 7 156 12 16 6 6 7Other 27 19 21 22 21

Table 8. Personal leisure careers by place (in percentages).

Personal leisure career Yerevan Kotayk Baku Aran-Mugan Tbilisi Shida Kartli

1 5 7 37 69 5 232 6 3 10 20 2 203 15 32 7 1 17 64 14 32 5 – 11 55 27 8 7 1 21 46 17 10 7 1 15 3Other 16 10 29 9 29 39

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participation in out-of-home leisure. However, as explained below, this could be acase of South Caucasus exceptionalism.

Social class

A set of predictors that can all be treated as measures of social class – family SES(Table 5), education (Table 6) and labour market careers (Table 7) – prove to beamong the main differentiators in young people’s leisure careers. A high SES familybackground, higher education, and a career in non-manual employment were all asso-ciated with maintaining or increasing levels of participation in going out, sport andhigh culture, and low scores on our ‘never’ variable. A positive relationship betweensocial class (however measured) and rates of participation in formal out-of-homeleisure is a familiar finding in leisure studies. To this we are adding that in our samplesthe differences widened between age 16 and 30.

Place

This proves to be the other (alongside social class) main discriminator as regardschanges in leisure behaviour between age 16 and 30. Azerbaijan had the most‘nevers’: 47% in Baku were in personal leisure career groups 1 and 2 compared with11% and 7% in the comparator capitals, Yerevan and Tbilisi. This is likely to reflectthe contrast between the historically Muslim culture in Azerbaijan (Armenia andGeorgia are both predominantly Christian) and our list of western leisure activities.

Respondents living in the capital cities were more likely than those in the non-capital regions to have maintained or increased their going out, and their participationin sport and consumption of high culture, and they scored fewer ‘nevers’ than those inthe non-capital regions. The exception here is Kotayk, the non-capital region in Arme-nia, which has a different profile in many respects compared with the two other non-capital regions – Aran-Mugan in Azerbaijan and Shida Kartli in Georgia. The latterare predominantly rural, with populations scattered between many small villages,where farming is the main economic activity. Kotayk is different. Most of its popula-tion lives in or close to medium-sized towns, and the southern boundary of Kotayk isjust 25 minutes drive from the centre of Yerevan.

Religion was not part of any of the main personal leisure career groups, but placewas by far the best predictor of whether respondents had increased their religiousparticipation between age 16 and 30. The religious revival had been an almost exclu-sively Georgia phenomenon. In Tbilisi 25% of the respondents were increasers, and35% in Shida Kartli, against between 6% and 14% in all the locations in Armenia andAzerbaijan. Its religious revival is as likely to be an indicator of Georgian patriotism(the main church is Georgian Orthodox) as pure religiosity.

Discussion

We must emphasise that our analysis has been of changes with age, not differencesbetween the uses of leisure of different socio-demographic groups of similar ages.Cross-sectional differences in leisure behaviour have remained unexamined. Most ofthese differences, if presented, would be familiar to leisure researchers in all coun-tries. Young males in the South Caucasus played more sport. A difference thatcurrently sets the South Caucasus apart from many other world regions is that

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young males were not only the more likely to drink alcohol regularly, but also tosmoke.

Changes that occur with age are important in their own right because instability isa feature of young people’s leisure. Our findings confirm the general downwards trendin early adulthood in out-of-home leisure – a trend which has been noted in all coun-tries where relevant evidence has been assembled (see Roberts, 2006). The only activ-ities in our survey where there was an overall upwards trend with age – religiousparticipation, and drinking and smoking – would not be classified as leisure by someresearchers. Our view is that they should definitely be included because they take-uptime and money that could otherwise be spent on other leisure activities. However, ourown evidence shows that these are different leisure ‘factors’, and that young adultsincrease, maintain or decrease their levels of smoking and drinking, and likewise reli-gious participation, independently of trends and tendencies in the rest of their leisure.Religion belonged to no single personal leisure profile, and increased smoking anddrinking could equally be in the context of high or nil involvement in structured formsof out-of-home leisure. The cross-national trend, to which drinking and smoking are(probably) common exceptions, and religious participation less so (in our research itrose widely only in Georgia), is for the post-teens to begin relinquishing more leisureactivities than they take up, and/or to reduce their frequency of participation.Lifestyles become more home-based, and this then becomes a lifelong trend (seeRoberts, 2006). According to our evidence, there is no South Caucasus exceptionalismin any of this.

However, our evidence has shown that not all young people reduce their involve-ment in out-of-home leisure as they progress through their twenties, and in ourresearch the likelihood of individuals maintaining or increasing their participationvaried considerably between socio-demographic groups. A ‘rule’ that operatedthroughout was that those with the lowest participation rates at age 16 were the leastlikely to maintain or increase, and the most likely to reduce their involvement. Thisapplied to social class differences, and the samples drawn from different localities.The tendency for those who initially do least to do even less, thus widening the gapbetween the active and the inactive, is possibly international. Those who acquire themost leisure capital during childhood, will be the most likely to build on these foun-dations during the next life stage. Fishwick and Hayes (1989) have shown that inIllinois (USA) the middle classes are less likely than the working class to reduce theirsports activity following their life stage transitions to parenthood.

In Britain there is an ongoing heated debate about whether we have entered a post-subcultural age in which youth cultures have become classless (see Bennett, 2000,2001; Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004; Muggleton, 2005). Maybe there are phasesduring the youth life stage when there is considerable overlap between the leisureactivities, tastes, scenes and places of young people from different social class back-grounds and heading towards different social class destinations. The socially (andsociologically) really significant issues are about trends over time as class destina-tions become clearer, and the contribution (if any) that leisure practices make tonarrowing or widening the social distance between different social classes (seeMacDonald and Shildrick, 2007). Trends in leisure behaviour in the South Caucasusfrom age 16 to 30 were widening the differences between the lifestyles of youngadults on different social class trajectories, and living in different places. This meantthat over time the social costs and barriers to mobility were growing steeper. Youngadults were evidently growing accustomed to the increasingly different lifestyles that

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were characteristic of the particular places where they lived, and the social classes towhich they belonged.

An important finding, in our view, is that the main way in which gender differ-ences in leisure behaviour widened between age 16 and 30 was that males were themore likely to start or increase their drinking and smoking. This particular wideninggender gap (in smoking) may well be specific to the South Caucasus in the 1990s and2000s. Otherwise gender differences that existed at age 16 were being perpetuated butwere not widening. Leisure was certainly not genderless, which Robinson and Godbey(1999) claim is increasingly the case in North America. However, apart from malesdoing more drinking and smoking, the sexes’ uses of leisure were no more differentat age 30 than at age 16. Education-to-work and family life stage transitions were notdriving the sexes’ leisure lives further and further apart. This is perhaps only to beexpected in so far as, in all modern societies, around or after age 16, self-selectedmales and females become close friends and eventually partners, and are likely tospend much of their leisure time together, increasing the likelihood that they will dosimilar things.

A related and also noteworthy finding is the absence of major differences inchanges in leisure behaviour depending on whether or not respondents had becomeparents by age 30. This is another finding that may well be South Caucasus specific.In Britain, which is probably a typical western country in this respect, family transi-tions (such as marrying and becoming a parent) are junctures where lifestyles tend tounfreeze, some leisure activities are dropped or done less frequently, and are replacedby other pastimes (generally home-based) (see Gershuny, 2003, Rapoport & Rapoport,1975). According to our evidence, the South Caucasus countries are different in thisrespect, and a likely reason is that most of the married couples in our research werecontinuing to reside with a set of the couple’s parents, usually the husband’s. This isa traditional cultural preference in the South Caucasus, especially in Armenia andGeorgia, but culture was being reinforced by the costs and availability of independenthousing for young singles and couples. Living in extended family households meantthat young parents had assistance with child care and were not burdened with theexpense of new household formation. Otherwise those who had become parents wouldprobably have been experiencing the life-cycle squeeze to which Estes and Wilenski(1978) drew attention some 30 years ago, and which appears to have intensified inwestern countries since then (see Zuzanek, Beckers, & Peters, 1998).

However, it is possible that a squeeze (pressure on time and money) is not whollyresponsible for the general decline in out-of-home leisure activity in young adulthoodthat occurs internationally, and had occurred among our own respondents with respectto watching and playing sports, the consumption of high culture, plus the set of activ-ities that we have labelled going out – to cafes, bars and restaurants, pop concerts,discos and the cinema. More than one sufficient cause of the general downwards trendcould be operating. Drop-out from teenage leisure activities could be at least partlydue to the break-up or loosening of peer groups after young people exit full-timeeducation. Another possibility is that individuals relinquish activities once these haveperformed specific developmental functions – when the actor feels a competent adult,and when he or she has established a secure, gendered and sexualised identity, forexample. These sources of change will operate in all modern societies, whatever theirmodes of family life and housing arrangements.

We stressed when introducing this paper that the detailed findings must be treatedas specific to the places where, and the historical time when, the data was collected.

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We would expect some of the findings to be very different if identical research wasconducted in Western Europe or North America. The absence of any impact of becom-ing a parent on personal leisure careers is one example. Another is the overall lowlevels of leisure activity. There were differences by place and other predictors, butaround a low ‘centre of gravity’. Altogether 35% of the respondents had never takenpart in three or more of the kinds of leisure activity about which we enquired. Levelsof activity were especially low in Azerbaijan and in all the non-capital regions. Only20% of the combined samples had maintained or increased their involvement in atleast two out of sport, ‘going out’ and high culture between age 16 and 30. In our viewthese findings are most likely to be due to the low levels of personal incomes andspending power under communism and subsequently, the near total absence of volun-tary associations catering for leisure, and the limited public sector provisions (undercommunism as well as during the transition).

Aspects of our findings were unexpected. During our respondents’ transitions toadulthood their countries underwent major historical transformations. Some featuresof the countries’ transformations were traumatic. In the early 1990s 50% or more wasripped from economic output and people’s living standards. At that time all threecountries were involved in military conflicts. Then, sometime in the mid- or late-1990s when peace had been restored, the economies started to grow steadily at 10%per year or more, and much more in some years in the case of Azerbaijan which beganto export oil and gas at the end of the 1990s. Yet our evidence shows that virtually allthe changes in our respondents’ leisure were age effects.

This finding from the South Caucasus may well have much wider, possibly global,relevance. Life course effects on leisure during young people’s transitions to adult-hood appear impervious, almost completely unresponsive, to changes in the macro-economic and political contexts. There could well be stronger direct leisure effects,with long-term implications for those concerned, at other life stages, very likely, in ourview, among children (who fail to acquire leisure capital), and less likely amongpeople aged over 30.

AcknowledgementThe research reported in this paper was funded by INTAS, project 05-1000008-7803.

Notes on contributorsKen Roberts is Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool. His books include Inner-city sport: who plays and what are the benefits? (1992), The leisure industries (2004), andLeisure in contemporary society (2006).

Gary Pollock is Head of the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University.His research interests include the transition from school to work and its connection to otherspheres of life.

Jochen Tholen is an Economist and Sociologist with special interests in the management of workorganisations, labour markets, and industrial relations. He has coordinated comparative studiesof managers in Germany, Britain and Russia, on the Europeanisation of industrial relations, andon human resource management in central Asia. Since 2001 he has been Research Director ofthe Institute of Labour and Economy at the University of Bremen.

Levan Tarkhnishvili is Co-director of BCG, Tbilisi, a social research organisation. He wasformerly Director of the Caucasus Research Resource Centre in Tbilisi.

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