Urban Youth Leisure, Time Use Research and Quality of Life: the Comparison of Leisure Preferences of University Students in Athens and Larissa, Greece

The role of youth leisure in cities is of special interest and university students (as young and generally more active personalities) hold an important place. The available time of students, exempting usual factors that generally influence leisure (age, sex, work, social class, spatio-temporal constraints), is mainly affected by the subject they choose to study (including their obligations) and by their perception of the city where the institution is located. There are few relevant international studies and even fewer Greek studies. The aim of this paper is to compare the leisure preferences of students in the capital of Greece (Athens) and a medium-sized city in central Greece (Larissa), as well as the impacts of leisure in their quality of life. A questionnaire based survey was used for the data collection. A sample of 440 students in both cities (400 of them in Athens and 40 in Larissa) participated in the research. Important inequalities exist in the most popular activities according to the place of study. One major contradiction (which pinpoints to the time-space interrelationship) is that, although there exists a greater plurality of resources in the capital, there also exist more constraints especially as far as transportation time is concerned.