Social status differentiation of leisure activities variation over the weekend – Approaching the voraciousness thesis by a sequence complexity measure

Sullivan and Katz-Gerro (2007) as well as Katz-Gerro and Sullivan (2010) argues that engaging in a variety ofleisure activities with high frequency is a distinct feature of omnivorous cultural consumption. And like omniv-orousness it bears a status-distinctive characteristic. The authors reported, that high status social categories show a more voracious leisure time-use pattern, i.e. engage in a greater number of activities with higher frequency over the period of one week. In this paper we are examining the voraciousness thesis by utilizing a newly proposed measure of activities variety, namely the sequence complexity index, which is developed by Gabadinho et al., 2011. Using data from German Time Use Survey (2000/2001) we focus on cultural leisure activities reportedfor the weekend. Our results show that complexity as a measure of time-related variety captures significant social differentiation of leisure activities over the weekend. But our complexity-based findings do not support that, that voraciousness understood as high levels of time used for varied leisure activities is also significant at weekend. Beyond that the results support the assumption, that there is social structural framing of a Saturday, where gender, age and marital statues effects on leisure variation come into effect.