DOI: 10.17608/k6.auckland.2000961.v1
title: ISSP2007: Leisure Time & Sports I

description: The seventeenth of 20 years of successful surveys for the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in New Zealand, run by Professor Philip Gendall in the Department of Marketing at Massey University.ISSP is a continuing annual programme of cross-national collaboration on surveys covering topics important for social science research. It brings together pre-existing social science projects and coordinates research goals, thereby adding a cross-national, cross-cultural perspective to the individual national studies. ISSP researchers especially concentrate on developing questions that are meaningful and relevant to all countries, and can be expressed in an equivalent manner in all relevant languages.Selection was a stratified by age random sample from the electoral rolls.A verbose rundown on topics covered follows.Leisure time: activities and satisfaction. The meaning of time and leisure, and its relation to work and other spheres of life. Sport/game activities and subjective functions of sport and games. Sociological aspects of sports. Social and political participation. Social determinants and consequences of leisure.Frequency of leisure activities in respondent’s free time; main purpose of free time activities; enjoyment from reading books, getting together with friends, taking part in physical activities, and watching TV or DVDs; motivation for leisure time activities: establishing useful contacts, relaxing, and developing skills in free time.Frequency of feeling bored, feeling rushed, and thinking about work during free time; preference for sharing time with other people or being alone; wishes for: more time in a paid job, more time doing household work, more time with family, and more time in leisure activities; number of nights the respondent stayed away from home for holiday or social visits; days of leave from work; most frequent exercises or physical activity.Preferred type of games rather than sports; most important reasons for taking part in sports or games: physical or mental health, meeting other people, competing against others or physical attractiveness; most frequently watched sport on TV; feeling of national pride when respondent’s country does well at international sports or games competition; attitudes towards sport (scale); social and political participation; trust in people; interest in politics; reasons for staying away from doing free time activities: lack of facilities nearby, lack of money and time, personal health or responsibility to take care of someone; perception of happiness; estimation of personal health. Whether the day before questioning was a working-day or a holiday; time of getting up and going to sleep on the day before; height and weight of respondent; wishes to gain or to lose weight; conception of an ideal shape of a man and a women on the bases of presented pictures.Demography: Sex; age; marital status; steady life partner; years of schooling; highest education level; country specific education and degree; current employment status (respondent and partner); hours worked weekly; occupation (ISCO 1988) (respondent and partner); supervising function at work; working for private or public sector or self-employed (respondent and partner); if self-employed: number of employees; trade union membership; earnings of respondent (country specific); family income (country specific); size of household; household composition; party affiliation (left-right); country specific party affiliation; participation in last election; religious denomination; religious main groups; attendance of religious services; self-placement on a top-bottom scale; region (country specific); size of community (country specific); type of community: urban-rural area; country of origin or ethnic group affiliation. Additionally coded: administrative mode of data-collection; weighting factor; case substitution.