Household Expenditure on Leisure: a Comparative Study of Italian Households with Children from Y- and Z-Generation

The intrinsic complexity of post-materialist society makes it challenging to investigate theconnection between social changes and generations. However, the study of consumptionmight help in the analysis of such a connection. In this paper, we analyse empirical data ofconsumption on leisure of Italian households, and focus on families at a very precise stage offamily life-cycle, that is, couples with teenager children. We look at consumption ofhouseholds at different points in time, 2001, 2007, and 2012, in order to investigate theimpact of both social change and generation of children–Y-generation in 2001 and 2007,and Z-generation in 2012–on the leisure expenditure patterns of families. Specifically, weconsider secondary data of yearly expenditure on a wide range of different leisure activities,and use hierarchical clustering and logistic regression to highlight specificities in familyconsumption patterns on leisure, depending on both the generation of offspring and theinter-time between sampled cohorts, 2001–2012 and 2007–2012. Our analysis indicates thepresence of differences between the consumption patterns on leisure of families with Ygenerationchildren and families with Z-generation children. However, our results also pointout that such differences cannot be explained by solely invoking the different generation ofoffspring, and that social changes should also be taken into account.