Going beyond work and family: A longitudinal study on the role of leisure in the work–life interplay

Abstract

SummaryGoing beyond the relation of work and family, the present three‐wave longitudinal study spanning one year assessed different forms of conflict and facilitation between leisure and the life domains work and family and their relation to subjective well‐being. A sample of N = 277 employed men and women reported their perceived conflict and facilitation between leisure, work, and family and subjective well‐being. Results suggest that leisure is a source of facilitation for work and family, and, at the same time, a major recipient of conflict from work and family. Moreover, leisure conflict was negatively correlated and leisure facilitation was positively associated with concurrent subjective well‐being. Both conflict and facilitation between all three life domains remained highly stable over the course of one year. Only few and non‐systematic lagged effects were found, indicating that the variance of the stability of the constructs and their relations over time leave little room for longitudinal predictions. Taken together, the study demonstrates that, similar to work–family relations, conflict and facilitation with the leisure domain are also associated with subjective well‐being and remain highly stable over the course of a year in the lives of young and middle‐aged adults. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Associations between Leisure Time Physical Activity, Mental Well-Being and Subjective Health in Middle Adulthood

“…Some evidence exists that LTPA is related to lower perceived stress levels among retired older adults but not among middle-aged employed adults (Zuzanek et al 1998). Middle adulthood is typically the busiest time in people's lives, as it includes meeting responsibilities towards one's children and one's parents as well as high job demands, and thus leaves little free time for leisure activities (Knecht et al 2016;Lachman et al 2015). It is possible that the present middle-aged participants also had only a small amount of leisure time and therefore other factors in their life were more important for their wellbeing.…”

The Mediating Role of Leisure Satisfaction between Work and Family Domain and Work-Life Balance

“…Apart from that, there is no known past research has explained the direct relationship between leisure satisfaction and work-life balance. However, according to Knecht, Wiese and Freund (2016) mentioned that high level of leisure involvement able to increase leisure satisfaction and this indirectly encourage work family enrichment among the employees. This is because most of the past study in the leisure area focused on the impact of the individual leisure behavior towards job performance (De Bloom, Rantanen, Tement & Kinnunen, 2017), academic performance (Aaltonen at el, 2016), teacher perspective (Aslan & Cansever, 2016) and improve the mental or physical health of the individual (Ferrari, Baldissera, Lange, Carreira, Silva, 2016).…”

Vulnerability in Health Trajectories: Life Course Perspectives

“…Indeed, the household in which individuals grew up, the schools they attended, the neighbourhoods in which they lived, their socioeconomic conditions in adulthood (McDonough et al 2005;Cullati 2015), their employment (Stone et al 2015;Benson et al 2017) and family histories (Dupre et al 2009;Benson et al 2017), the (normative and non-normative) transitions they experienced as well as the different adversities they met during their life, affect chances of growing and remaining in good health. The mutual influences of different life spheres like work and family impact the health trajectories in adulthood (Knecht et al 2011;Cullati 2014;Cullati et al 2014a;Knecht et al 2016), as well as the period and country in which individuals live (Sacker et al 2011; Burton-Jeangros and Zimmermann-Sloutskis 2016). Individual health trajectories also depend on individuals' ability to adapt to their living contexts, to cope with stress, such as a stressful psycho-social environment at work (Theorell 2000;Eatough et al 2016), a poor relational environment in the family (Lehman et al 2009;Berg et al 2017), life-time adversity (Seery et al 2010), and adapt to a health impairment (Cooper and Bigby 2014) or the health impairment of their partner (Berg and Upchurch 2007).…”