The diversity of activities in a repertoire of leisure is a variable shown to have considerable impact on the quality of leisure and beneficial personal outcomes, and it is proposed as one important indicator of cultural capital. Theoretical perspectives on cultural capital indicate the importance of education in preparing individuals for broad patterns of leisure consumption in addition to status attainment. Contemporary advances demonstrate that status attainment cannot be equated with high cultural consumption and that broadly omnivorous leisure pursuits may be more valuable to social actors. Role attachment theory and disengagement theory are additionally explored as possible theoretical explanations that assist in predicting leisure diversity that is highly patterned by employment and one's age. The number of different leisure experiences that constitute an individual's leisure repertoire is expected to change throughout the life-course as needs for cultural capital vary and as demands in paid and domestic work change. Tobit models of leisure diversity are proposed using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data. Findings indicate that leisure diversity is impacted by ethnicity, recent immigration, age and socio-economic status, and theoretically relevant conditional relationships are explored.

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Le Québec a adopté en 1997 une politique créant un système universel de garderies offrant des places à 5 $ par jour. Dans cet article, à l'aide de données des recensements de 1996, de 2001 et de 2006, nous analysons l'impact de cette politique sur les stratégies de conciliation travail-famille qu'adoptent les couples, et nous comparons la situation québécoise à celle du reste du Canada. Nos résultats montrent que la politique québécoise, en plus d'avoir permis d'accroître la participation des femmes au marché du travail, a contribué à réduire le nombre de familles où l'on observe une distribution traditionnelle du travail, une réduction plus marquée parmi les couples vivant en union libre que parmi les couples mariés. Toutefois, ces effets sont beaucoup moins importants que les différences reliées au capital humain des deux parents.Mots clés : garderies, stratégies des ménages, soin des enfants, double charge de travail, participation au marché du travail, sexe, famille, capital humainIn 1997 Quebec adopted a policy providing universal pre-school daycare for five dollars per day. Comparing Quebec to the rest of Canada, we use the 1996, 2001, and 2006 Canadian censuses to determine the impact of this policy on couples' strategies for combining employment and child care. As well as increasing female labour force participation, the policy reduced the number of families with a traditional division of labour, showing greater effects on common-law than on married couples. These effects, however, are considerably smaller than are differences related to the two parents' human capital.

Role diversity, Social engagement, Networks, Time-use, Disengagement theory, Role theory, Social integration, Social capital, Aging, Work, Leisure,

This study assesses trends in leisure time by life course and family characteristics in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using national time-use data collected since the mid-1960s, it is hypothesized that important family characteristics are responsible for substantial variation in leisure time that is not recognized in accounts of leisure time among working adults or within national populations. An important finding indicates that leisure is either stable or has increased somewhat in the three Western democracies studied. Social characteristics, family, and employment contexts account for considerable variation in leisure time. Findings demonstrate an increased disadvantage in leisure time among parents of young children after controlling for social background characteristics. Analyses demonstrate the need to qualify accounts of over-work and the double-burden on available leisure time. The perspective of structural constraints integrates neoclassical economic approaches to marginal utility maximization and sociological approaches to gender, and clarifies the impact of changed economic relations that produce less gendered though more differentiated patterns of leisure when parenting.