Leisure Behavior Among Contemporary Egyptians

An instrument, which was used previously in studying time budgets of 12 nationals, was used in this study to depict leisure lifestyle among 162 male subjects and 218 female subjects. The instrument was composed of three parts: a pre-diary questionnaire interview, a 24-hour diary and a post-diary questionnaire/interview.The female subjects were randomly selected to represent college-educated homemakers, homemakers without college education, married working women, unmarried working women, and female students. Male subjects were randomly selected to represent professional men, clerical men, manual laborers, businessmen, and male students.The instrument is designed to reveal the time allocated in a 24-hour period for work, family care, education, personal life, sleeping, transportation, and praying. The instrument reveals the leisure lifestyle, such as going out (visitations, movies, nightclubs, games, and museums), clubs and organizations (attending and volunteering), passive recreation (talking, television watching, listening to music, reading, writing, and planning) and positive recreation (walking, jogging, active sport, playing cards and table games, hobbies, and playing music).Differences of varying degrees were found to exist between the Egyptian sample and other nationals and between the two groups of men and women from Egypt when divided according to work or domestic roles in most of the leisure activities listed above.