Analysis: How Leisure Has Changed Over Time

In class we were asked to state our opinion on if we believe leisure has increased or decreased over time. Through my observations growing up I believe that time spent during leisure has maybe slightly decreased possibly due to people seemingly becoming more busy with careers, but the biggest observation I believe is upon us it the decrease of quality leisure. I seems with technological advancements today and the added work loads on adults, our society seems to spend way too much time in front of the TV or playing video games. These activities can be considered leisure by an individual, although I would argue that it is not exactly quality leisure. With things getting more expensive also I believe that maybe it is harder to enjoy quality leisure or get experiences if say you were poor.

After researching a few articles I came across an article

These two studies were the American Heritage Time Use Study also known as (AHTUS), and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). After looking through the charts from the AHTUS study some of my observations from before were confirmed. Television watching was on the top of the charts with out of home leisure second, and sport/exercise in third. What was interesting about this study was that it compared the hours per week used to do each leisure activity from 1965 to 2003. Over that period of time the hours spent watching TV, which was already the highest form of leisure in 1965, grew from 11.7 hours to 18.5 hours a week for low education individuals and raised from 7.7 hours in 1965 to 13.6 hours in 2003 for high education. An interesting observation was that the second place in both dates which was “out of home leisure” stayed the same over time standing at 2.7 hours per week. Sports/exercise also had a very slight increase of just 0.6 hours. The grand observation of the intricate graph displayed was that low education/class individuals were spending more time