‘My mum just wants me out of the house’: the leisure lifestyles of white-working class adolescents

The sports participation rates of British adults remain strongly influenced by their social class background, with those from the bottom of the social class hierarchy significantly less likely to take part in sport and/or active leisure. These trends are closely linked to the types of active leisure participation that adults engage in as young people, with those from working-class backgrounds more likely to engage in a narrower range of class-related activities in their youth, a trend that has been shown to constrain the likelihood of them participating into adulthood. One of the influences on this outcome is the way in which parental influence comes to impact upon the ways that young people from working-class family’s approach and engage in activities during their leisure time. In order to explore this influence, this paper examines the leisure lifestyles of white, working-class adolescent males via the use of group interviews in an attempt to explain their current and future participation of working-class male adolescents in sport and active leisure. The study utilised responses from 47 participants in Years 10 and 11 across eight focus group interviews as part of a semi-ethnographical multi-method design in a predominantly white, working-class mainstream secondary school. The results found that the participants spent significant amounts of their leisure time engaged in class-related, recreational activities within the local area alongside their peers. Linked to this was the apparent lack of formal guidance and support from their parents in relation the participants’ regular involvement in organised sporting activities. The behaviours and attitudes of these participants meant that the majority of the participants were neither inclined nor ‘set up’ to participate in the types and range of activities that may well have kept them active into and through adulthood.