Search Results

This chapter addresses three contextual influences on the onset, continuation, or escalation of offending during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. First the chapter examines four individual life circumstances that typically undergo dramatic change during the transition to adulthood—romantic relationships and marriage, parenthood, employment and leisure activities, reviewing what is known about their impact on the continuity or discontinuity in offending. Second the chapter addresses the situational factors surrounding specific criminal events, including crime places, asking how they change with the transition to adulthood and how their influences may be moderated by age. Finally the chapter turns to the broad context of neighborhood and community, examining how they set the stage for the transition to adulthood and how they may moderate the effects of individual life circumstances, either facilitating or impeding the successful transition to adult roles that can lead to desistance from crime. For each of the three contextual influences, the chapter provides a review of the current literature and recommendations for productive directions for future research.

Cafés are places where people are essentially forced to take a stance on the morality of specific activities, not only by choosing whether to partake, but also by passively accepting others' participation in their presence. Because many of the moral “rules” about the sorts of things one can do in a café—like listen to music or smoke argileh—are not clear-cut, cafés require people to navigate complex moral terrain in order to have fun while feeling good about themselves. This chapter takes up a number of these debatable activities in order to show how more or less pious Shi'i Muslims, especially youths, employ moral flexibility in their discourses and practices of leisure. In some cases, people negotiate among different rubrics of morality, while in others they choose to ignore particular tenets or disagree about the accuracy of a rule in the first place.

The Internet has radically transformed the way we live our lives. The net changes in consumer surplus and economic activity, however, are difficult to measure because some online activities, such as obtaining news, are new ways of doing old activities while new activities, like social media, have an opportunity cost in terms of activities crowded out. This paper uses data from the American Time Use Survey from 2003–2011 to estimate the crowdout effects of leisure time spent online. That data show that time spent online and the share of the population engaged in online activities has been increasing steadily. I find that, on the margin, each minute of online leisure time is correlated with 0.29 fewer minutes on all other types of leisure, with about half of that coming from time spent watching TV and video, 0.05 minutes from (offline) socializing, 0.04 minutes from relaxing and thinking, and the balance from time spent at parties, attending cultural events, and listening to the radio. Each minute of online leisure is also correlated with 0.27 fewer minutes working, 0.12 fewer minutes sleeping, 0.10 fewer minutes in travel time, 0.07 fewer minutes in household activities, and 0.06 fewer minutes in educational activities.

The potential of older people’s participation in leisure activities as a means of creating community capital is an expanding focus of research by gerontologists although to date the leisure engagement of rural elders has received comparatively little attention. This chapter focuses on older people’s connections to rural community life through their engagement in cultural and leisure activities. Older rural residents’ leisure participation and its determinants are considered from a life course perspective as well as the forms and uses of later life leisure within the rural community context. Findings from the GaPL survey on types and frequency of current participation in individual and group-oriented hobbies and social activities are presented. Patterns of participation across life stages are examined through findings from oral histories focused on respondents’ ‘leisure lives’. The chapter also describes a community oral history project designed to raise awareness of older people as rural social and cultural capital and to increase public engagement with this research that formed part of this work.

This chapter shows that Jewish social life in the 19th century slowly became more sophisticated and less exclusive. Numerous German Jews acquired manners appropriate to polite gentile society and began attending cultural events such as concerts and the theater. Though most Jews continued to socialize mainly with coreligionists, mixed Christian-Jewish formal and informal circles became more common. Jews of the higher classes were admitted to general bourgeois associations, and Jews participated in slowly growing numbers in local government and national politics. Violence against Jews became less common. In the liberal era of the 1850s and 1860s, barriers to Jewish mixing with non-Jews were probably lower than ever before in German history, though separate social circles were still quite noticeable.

The social background, attitudes, and general experiences of pupils contribute towards establishing the pupil culture in the school. In addition to interaction with people, pupil culture is the result of the pupils' relationship with, and attitude towards, school work and the events that constitute pupil activity in the school. Pupil values influence pupil culture as they encompass and are reflected in pupils' views on different aspects of school life, including ideology and school work. This chapter examines the life of the pupil in terms of school-generated experiences and activities in order to understand what it means to be a pupil in the Rishi Valley School. It discusses pupil' school entry, pupil perspectives on school work, co-curricular and leisure-time activities, sport as an important aspect of the pupils' lives in school, pupil-pupil interaction, and pupil perspectives on the school, and pupil aspirations. The relationship of the pupils with J. Krishnamurthy's transcendental ideology is also discussed.

This chapter is centred on children's home environment and their personal and familial lives. It reveals children's inner thoughts and fears, which include their families, themselves, and their futures. The chapter is composed of three main sections. The first is on children's opportunities for play and leisure activities at home, while the second is on their understanding and perception of money and need within their families. The third and final section is on children's perceptions of the impact of poverty on their lives.

This chapter focuses on the affective component of subjective well-being, specifically in connection with how children feel about how they spend their time. The results for children's enjoyment of time in different activities are perhaps unsurprising, showing that they generally do not enjoy time at school and time doing homework, and they enjoy very much time in screen-based activities and other leisure. Central to the basic understanding of what constitutes a good childhood is that children have the time and space to have fun and enjoy themselves. Based on these results it might well be suggested that in order to maximise child well-being they should be encouraged to spend more time in leisure activities including screen time, and to avoid or minimise time in school and doing homework. One can easily imagine children cheering this proposition on, but prior research demonstrates that there is a degree of mismatch between feelings about time use during activities and indicators of general well-being. Although children tend to find time in education-related activities unenjoyable, and they express comparatively low levels of happiness with this area of their lives, some have found these to be positively associated with overall happiness. The chapter then examines the rarely studied experience of time pressure among children.

Spare Time was Humphrey Jennings' first, and the last major, film of the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit before it became the Crown Film Unit late in 1940. This chapter discusses different elements of one of the best films the GPO ever made, Spare Time. The general purpose of the film was to show that workers of all grades have a secondary life, over and above their working life, in which colliers may become musicians, musicians may become engineers, and engineers may become dog-fanciers. The film is in three sections; each one is devoted to an industrial city or region and associated leisure activities. The three industries are steel (Sheffield), cotton (Bolton and Manchester) and coal (Pontypridd). The combined effect of the three sections is a reflection on aspects of English character and culture through a focus on region and leisure, with the latter contrasted to scenes and spaces related to work.

The chapter “Recovery from work and employee sleep” focuses on specific employee experiences and activities during nonwork time that may impact the quality and quantity of employee sleep. First, it introduces several theoretical frameworks that can help understand the possible relationships between nonwork experiences and sleep. It then describes a variety of experiences and activities that are common during nonwork time. Next, the chapter reviews past research differentiating between time-based, thought-based, and arousal-based processes. Findings regarding time-based processes include technology use, personal care, caregiving, and leisure activities. Research related to thought-based processes refers to work-related as well as nonwork-related thoughts, worry/rumination, and mental rest and relaxation. Finally, research around arousal-based processes includes technology use, social interaction, and exercise. The chapter ends with suggested implications for research and practice considering all three processes.

The capacity of music to engage auditory, cognitive, motor, and emotional functions across cortical and subcortical brain regions and the relative preservation of music in the aging and degenerating brain makes music a promising tool both in supporting healthy neurocognitive aging and maintaining better emotional well-being, cognitive functioning, and communication and social interaction in different stages of dementia. As the incidence and prevalence of aging-related neurological illnesses is rapidly increasing, it is important to develop music-based interventions that make use of self- or caregiver-implemented musical leisure activities and that are enjoyable and effective in the everyday care of the persons with dementia. This chapter reviews recent experimental evidence on the emotional and cognitive effects of musical leisure activities in healthy older adults and in persons with dementia and their caregivers. The chapter also discusses which factors are crucial for the efficacy of music in different stages of dementia.

This chapter discusses the society of Hong Kong during the late nineteenth century. It begins by discussing cultural and leisure activities during the 1870s, which included amateur theatrical performances and the revival of the Debating Society. It looks at the social distinctions in the country, most especially between the merchants and tradesmen. The Hong Kong Club, the visit of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and the changes that occurred in the social set-up are also discussed.

This introductory chapter argues that American families today have been busier than the previous generation, with parents working more hours outside of the home and children spending more time in organized settings. Middle-class parents are racing from work to children's classes and practices to home everyday. Anthropologist Marjorie Goodwin explains that “increasingly middle class parents are going to extraordinary lengths to foster their children's talents through maintaining a hectic schedule of organized leisure activities.” On that note, sociologists Annette Lareau highlights that this generation of parents conducts a “concerted cultivation,” the organized and interactive activity in which children are admonished to question adults in a variety of institutional settings.

This chapter focuses on the various facets of domestic life at La Isabela. La Isabela was dramatically different from other late fifteenth-century European towns in many ways. The population was virtually all male and was located in an utterly isolated and essentially alien place at the edge of the Spaniards' known world. It nevertheless contained a community of people who faced most of the concerns common to households and communities everywhere, which includes household organization, health and sanitation, religious life, personal appearance, social hierarchy, leisure activities, and personal economy. The absence of women undoubtedly shaped domestic life in a dramatic way and the men who formed the households of the town still had to provide for food, clothing, lighting, sanitation, and other domestic necessities.

This chapter analyzes the role of videogames in exercise. “Exergames” hope to increase the interactivity demands of videogames, such that players may reach the levels and rates of activity required for a workout, thus replacing a sedentary leisure activity with active leisure activity. Exergames must inspire their players to move, but they also must inspire them to want to move. In doing so, these games both adopt existing rituals and practices form other domains, like sports, and establish new ones unique to videogames. These games both simulate and create the social rituals that make players want to be physically active.

This chapter looks at how cowboys increasingly turned to their leisure activities to define and display their manhood, only to find, once again, that cattlemen and other respectable townspeople tried to limit these activities as well. It examines how the men themselves defined masculinity through their friendships and associations. Cowboys used humor against their employers and racism against nonwhites to bolster their own masculine identity as they lost opportunities to display it elsewhere. Anglo cowboys maintained a sense of self-worth through comparison with and denigration of the many black and Hispanic cowboys. Tied into both Anglo cowboys' and cattlemen's ideals of masculinity was a racial ideology that placed white men, whatever their social status, as being superior to other ethnicities. Thus, the cowboys' sense of masculinity was in part created in defense against social realities.

This chapter focuses on the use of Opium and how its use expanded into other parts of the world, including Cuba, as the number of Chinese migrants grew to massive numbers. Opium had been used in China as a medicinal drug since the ninth century, hundreds of years before the European empires established colonial beachheads there. While the number of Chinese who used opium grew ever higher during the nineteenth century, most users apparently did so in moderation, often for social reasons, without becoming addicted or harming their health. Those who smoked the drug in China did not sit slumped in seedy opium dens, with eyes glazed over, as popularly depicted in the Western media. On the contrary, users came together in social and fraternal halls that scarcely differed in any way from other well-ordered and respectable venues of leisure activity and social intermingling.