Four thousand hours a year (1998)

Adolescents who live at youth protection institutions, like most adolescents, spend far more time outside school than in school. The time disparity itself makes leisure contexts significant regarding the adolescents’ developmental processes. In addition, research has shown that leisure experiences do contribute to the developmental process in both negative and positive directions. However, little is known about how free time contexts are experienced by underserved adolescents who live at youth protection institutions, or about how leisure may be utilized to meet the adolescents’ needs and desires in their everyday lives. The present study focuses first of all on the everyday free time behavior, and how this is experienced in the social ecology of the everyday life of the adolescents.