Towards a theoretical clarification of the ‘spillover’ and ‘compensatory’ work/leisure hypotheses

Two thorny problems have attracted the interest of work/leisure researchers in recent years: (1) the failure of previous research to clearly isolate the relationship between work and non-work from the effects of other confounding variables, and (2) a widespread failure to distinguish between the meanings that people attribute to work (and non-work) and the forms of work (and non-work) people perform. The argument for phenomenological research is made; in this way, empirically-grounded ‘common sense’ definitions of work and leisure could be created and these definitions could be used as a solid research base to test ‘spillover’ and ‘compensatory’ theories of the work/leisure relationship. The author then demonstrates, through the development of an analytic framework for viewing the work/leisure relationship, the fact that ‘compensatory’ and ‘spillover’ hypotheses are potential alternative modes of explanation. Unless the conditions under which each might apply can be specified, one or the other hypothesis can explain a given empirical relationship between the two variables. This further supports the need for solid phenomenological research.