Relationships between work and leisure attributes across occupational and sex groups in australia

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Abstract
The work and leisure activities of 1383 employed persons were described using five task attributes — influence, variety, pressure, skill—utilization and interaction, in order to test three theories of work and leisure—compensation, generalization and segmentation. There were significant occupational differences on the work attributes, but there were few occupational differences on the leisure attributes. Also there were few significant correlations between the attributes of people's work and leisure activities. These results tend to support the segmentalist theory of work and leisure. While there were no strong relationships between work and leisure attributes for the total sample there were occupational differences in work/leisure relationships. High status occupations showed significant decreases in attributes such as influence, variety and skill‐utilization from work to leisure, while low status occupations showed non‐significant increases from work to leisure. Females generally had lower levels of the work attributes in comparison to males. They also showed stronger patterns of compensation, especially on the dimensions of influence and variety. It was concluded that the understanding of work/leisure relationships would be enhanced by studying how persons develop different workfleisure patterns rather than postulating universal compensation/generalization processess.