Leisure activity variety before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Focus on temporal Stability, gender Differences, and social capital

Abstract

The extraordinary disruption since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the need to better understand changes in people’s activity and mobility patterns. Reduced leisure activity space and differing risk profiles due to public health interventions changed people’s ability to participate in different discretionary activity types. Using survey samples collected in 2019 and 2020, this paper conducted comprehensive statistical tests for temporal stability and gender difference of leisure variety and its contributing factors such as social capital, mobility, personalities, and demographics on leisure variety. Model inference shows an average 37% reduction in leisure variety in 2020, ceteris paribus. Individuals with more social capital, particularly instrumental capital, have substantial and significantly higher leisure activity variety, and the effect size remains temporally stable before and during the pandemic. This result suggests social capital robustly impacts activity variety even under drastic changes and restrictions. Openness to experience remains temporally stable and consistent between genders, but age, household size, and extraversion are among the factors that exhibit temporal instability.

Keywords

• Activity diversity modeling
• Instrumental support
• Social capital
• Temporal instability
• Social resources