APA 2011

Children’s Weekend Time Use, Activity Choices, and Enjoyment Across Four Cultures

Asil Ali Özdoğru

Out-of-school time constitutes a major context of social and emotional development for children across cultures. Weekend time as an out-of-school context is particularly important because of its length of duration and availability of activities. Children’s participation and engagement in various weekend activities are influenced by their social, economic, and cultural environments. Because it is not constrained by school attendance, weekend time allows cultural and gender differences in time usage to emerge. As in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory, different layers of environment provide distinct set of activities and interactions for children. Parental preferences and cultural values shape children’s time use, activity choices, and enjoyment of those activities. Time use offers insight on the valued developmental outcomes associated with different activities in different cultures. Parental involvement in children’s activity choices provides information on cultural parenting strategies and socialization patterns. Children’s activity enjoyment is associated with positive developmental outcomes due to activity participation. Relationship between activity choice and enjoyment is valuable in the test of overscheduling hypothesis, which claims that children develop negative emotional outcomes when hurried into many structured activities.

In this study, children’s weekend activities and choices were examined for fourth grade students in four countries. A total of 1,265 children of families from middle socioeconomic status in Bulgaria, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States completed an activity survey asking them to state their typical activity for each of 12 hours on Saturday from 10am to 10pm. Children also reported their enjoyment of each activity and whether it was self- or adult-chosen. Activities children freely entered into each hour field then coded into eight major activity categories, which were watching TV, play, reading for fun, academics, organized sports, extracurricular activities, outings, and routine maintenance activities. Average interrater reliability between different activity coders was .89.

Findings indicated that children across the four countries spent most of their weekend time in self-chosen unstructured activities. There was a great deal of variation across countries in the amount and choice of time spent in different activity types. In the two-way 4x2 ANOVA models, country was a significant factor in all of the eight activity duration outcomes, whereas gender was significant in four of the eight activities. Taiwanese children led other countries in the amount of time spent in academics, extracurricular activities, and watching TV. Children in Turkey spent more time in routine maintenance activities, reading, and outing than children of other countries. Children from the US reported spending more time than other children in play and sports. Girls reported spending more time than boys in routines, reading, and extracurricular activities, whereas boys used more time in play than girls. Girls in all countries spent more time in academics than boys except in Taiwan.

In terms of activity choices, Bulgarian children led other countries in the amount of time spent in self-chosen activities, whereas Taiwanese children had the highest amount of time spent in adult-chosen activities. Girls in overall had more time in adult-chosen activities than boys did. Among the activities, outing and extracurricular activities had higher proportions of adult-choice than self-choice.

Children’s enjoyment of their activities was negatively related to the amount of adult-chosen activities they had (r = .233, p < .001). Even though there was not a moderation effect of country or gender on this relationship, there were some differences between Turkish children and children from other countries.

Results suggest that cultures differ in the available and socially acceptable types of weekend activities as demonstrated by the time spent by children in different activities and extent of parental involvement in children’s activity decisions. It is not surprising that Taiwan, like other Asian cultures, would have higher levels of parental control and authority than other cultures. The finding that Bulgarian children had the lowest level of adult-chosen weekend activities might be due in part to changing parenting models in the post-socialist era providing greater autonomy to children. To a certain extent, the findings about adult-choice and enjoyment support the claims of adherents of the overscheduling hypothesis that free play and less adult control foster optimal emotional outcomes. However, culturally different socialization processes associated with activity choice and participation help shape children’s emotional experiences. The relatively less negative reaction of Turkish children, especially boys, to adult-chosen activities may point to unique qualities of parenting and socialization practices of Turkish parents. Turkish parenting strategies are described as authoritarian as well as caring, a combination which is not easily categorized within major parenting styles. Weekend time provides important developmental niches within which children in different countries experience activities that contribute to their personal and social developmental outcomes.In addition to often-studied American and Taiwanese cultures, this study focused on children in the less researched Bulgarian and Turkish cultures. Offering a cross-cultural comparison of aspects of child development and socialization practices in the out-of-school context, the study produced some findings that challenge strictly categorical and polarized views of cultural processes. It calls attention to the dynamic and complex nature of social and emotional development of children in different cultures around the world.

Keywords: Out-of-school time, weekend activities, children, cross-cultural

Citation: Özdoğru, A. A. (2011, August). Children’s weekend time use, activity choices, and enjoyment across four cultures. Poster presented at the 119th convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, USA.