Bourdieu's Theoretical Approach for Understanding the Relationship between Cultural Capital of Student Families and their Leisure Taste(A Case Study of the Students in Tehran University)

Appropriate spending of leisure time has an important  role in the formation of  youth personality. Different types of capital- social, cultural and economic- have implications for  social status of individual actor. Bourdieu  ’s analysis of leisure time is based on cultural capital. The main goals of this study are the examination of the relationships between leisure time activities, cultural capital of students’ family,  gender and marital status. The approach of this study is descriptive-comparative and the methodology of research is survey. The statistical population consists of all the students of Tehran university in 2010. The sample size is equal to 400 and is calculated by Cochran formula. Types of leisure time activities are divided into five groups: intellectual, social, entertaining, artistic and cultural, and physical activities. The results indicate that students’ leisure time is mostly devoted to physical and entertaining activities and entertaining and social are more common among female students than male students.  In addition, cultural capital is higher amongst the student of basic science than social science. Cultural capital has significant relationship with different types of leisure activities except physical activities. It has the strongest relationship with social leisure, artistic-cultural, intellectual and entertaining activities respectively