Abstract
Researchers have used the amount of leisure as a yardstick to proxy for quality of life, but so far they have paid scant attention to the quality of leisure. Here I use spousal leisure sharing to proxy for quality of leisure and, by implication, for quality of life. I draw on life-cycle perspective, price theory, and on human ecology to frame hypotheses about the determinants of spousal leisure sharing. Drawing on longitudinal information collected over 2 years from 32 households in two villages of Tawahka Amerindians, a horticultural and foraging society in the tropical rain forest of eastern Honduras, I estimate the simultaneous effects of age and age squared, cash income, and climatic/seasonal variables on the amount of time spouses spend together in leisure. Analysis using different random and fixed-effect multivariate logit models suggests that (1) life-cycle determinants play a strong role in spousal leisure sharing and (2) neither climate/seasonal variables nor income correlate with spousal leisure sharing. As is true among couples in the United States, among Tawahka couples a change in the income of either spouse has a small effect on the amount of leisure shared by spouses. I find no evidence that economic development erodes spousal leisure sharing or that couples exhibit fissure in their pursuit of a common goal of leisure sharing.
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Godoy, R.A. The Life Cycle, Ecological, and Economic Determinants of Spousal Leisure Sharing: Panel Estimations from Tawahka Amerindians, Honduras. Human Ecology 30, 317–337 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016568518628
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016568518628