Adolescents’ music preferences and activities during leisure time

Abstract

Background Music plays an important role in adolescents’ leisure time concerning the time they spend in listening to music, following music themes in media and engaging themselves in extra-curricular music activities and hobbies (playing, composing, singing) (Schwartz & Fouts, 2003). From a socio-cultural perspective, music represents a significant cultural tool for personal development, especially in the domains of values and aesthetic standards (North, & Hargreaves, 2008). Some authors claim that the present adolescent generation differs from the previous generations in terms of music preferences and practices concerning new types of music and new media (Petrović & Kuzmanović, 2009). Aims Our main goal was to detect adolescents’ groups regarding their interests and engagement in music activities. Method The sample includes 1358 secondary school students. From the questioner, developed for the wider study of free time of adolescents, 23 items related to music preferences and activities (extracurricular, hobbies) were selected. Results Cluster analysis was used in order to identify adolescent groups on the basis of their preferences, engagement with music and following of music themes in different media. Analysis identified 4 groups of youngsters that were interpreted through 3 statistically significant discriminative functions, and 80% of the respondents were classified correctly. The first adolescent group prefers metal, punk and rock music, don’t listen to folk music and don’t play music (15% of the sample). 184 Psihologija i muzika • Psychology and Music PAM – IE Conference, 24–26. October 2019, Belgrade The second group listens to folk music and do not prefer techno, electro and hip-hop music (24%). The third group prefers folk music and follows musical themes on media (27%). Finally, the largest fourth group (32% of the sample) doesn’t listen to folk music, doesn’t follow musical themes and, besides that, does not have any clear musical tendencies and preferences. Conclusions Our results show that it is possible to differentiate adolescents regarding their music orientations unlike some predictions about the lack of various preferences within the new young generation (Petrović & Kuzmanović, 2009). It is obvious that two groups of respondents incline toward folk music and that one of them follows themes about music in media. This implies the strong media influence on adolescents’ preferences, which is in accordance with youth idols research results (Stepanović, Blažanin & Mojović, 2017), and raises a question about the quality of contents in contemporary media. One-third of adolescents is not interested in music. Besides, our data show that adolescents rarely take part in activities and hobbies related to music which leaves no space for the development of interests and engagement that could be associated with the concepts of positive development and structurally founded leisure time activities (Larson, 2000; Stebbins, 1997).