Leisure Activity Patterns and Marital Conflict in Iran

Over the past few decades, the association between leisure activity patterns and marital conflict or satisfaction has been studied extensively. However, most studies to date have been limited to middle-class families of developed societies, and an investigation of the issue, from a developing country perspective like Iran, is non-existent.

In an observational, analytical, cross-sectional study we aimed to investigate the relationship between leisure activity patterns and marital conflict in a nationally representative sample of Iranian married males.

Using the cluster sampling method, a representative sample of 400 Iranian married individuals from seven provinces of Iran was surveyed. Self-administered surveys included a checklist collecting demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the enrolled participants, leisure time questionnaire, and marital conflict questionnaire. The main patterns of leisure activity were derived from principal component analysis. For each pattern, factor scores were calculated. The relationship between factor scores and marital conflict were assessed using multivariate linear regression models accounting for the potential confounding effects of age, education, socioeconomic status, job status, number of children, duration of marriage, and time spent for leisure.

Two hundred and ninety-nine respondents completed the leisure time and marital conflict questionnaires. Five major leisure patterns were identified accounting for 60.3% of the variance in data. The most dominant pattern was family-oriented activities (e.g. spending time with family outdoors and spending time with family indoors) and was negatively linked to marital conflict (standardized beta= -0.154, P = 0.013). Of the four remaining patterns, three only included individual activities and one was a family-individual composite. Individual patterns exhibited discrepant behavior; while the pattern involving activities like 'watching TV', 'non-purposive time spending', and 'napping' was positively associated with conflict (standardized beta = 0.165, P = 0.009) and the other two were not. The mixed family-individual pattern was also positively associated with marital conflict (standardized beta = 0.240, P < 0.001).

Among Iranian married men, family-based leisure activities are linked to a lower level of marital conflict. The associations for individual patterns are less congruent.