ABSTRACT
Research began by studying and identifying features that characterized the leisure of specic age groups. It was subsequently noted that people built long-term leisure careers, and that their leisure in later life stages was inuenced by whatever they had done and learnt earlier in life. The next complication to be noted was that early-life leisure learning varied not just cross-sectionally by gender, social class, ethnicity and place, but also according to historical period. The ideal way of disaggregating age, cohort and historical inuences is through sequential birth cohort studies. The rst such study commenced in Britain in 1946. Subsequently, additional British birth cohort studies have been launched in 1958, 1970, 2000 and 2012. These projects take a lifetime to mature. The oldest cohort that is still being studied (those born in 1946) are only just entering later life, enabling the long-term eects of experiences during childhood and youth to be explored. Unfortunately, as so often happens, the early waves of these studies did not collect all the evidence (about leisure during childhood and youth, in our case) that we would now like to have at our disposal. Even so, as explained below, there are good reasons to believe that current cohorts that are entering later life will exhibit dierent leisure proles from those of older people in the twentieth century. There are also reasons to believe that today’s children and young people will become a dierent leisure generation than any of their predecessors.
