Family and leisure: a comparative sociological study of middle-class families and their leisure patterns in France and Great Britain

Abstract

The purpose of this Thesis is to increase the amount of understanding and add to knowledge concerning leisure patterns in two advanced industrial societies, France and Great Britain. Using the middle-class family as the vehicle, the two societies are compared with four main aims in view: firstly to identify and underline similarities and differences between them in sociological approaches to the study of leisure, in actual leisure behaviour and in attitudes towards leisure within middleclass families; secondly to determine to what extent such similarities and differences can be explained in terms of the institutional structures and patterns of each society; thirdly to bring to the attention of French and British sociologists an area of the other's research which, apart from a very few studies, is in general not widely known to them; fourthly to document and analyse some of the problems involved in carrying out crossnational research. Data for the Thesis are derived from an empirical study based on questionnaire interviews with sixty French and British middleclass families and more detailed case studies of four families, The findings about their leisure behaviour are examined and are interpreted with reference to portrait data about the two towns and knowledge about the broader socio-cultural contexts.