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affect the nature and content of consumption. While it is banal to observe that friends, kin, colleagues and neighbours influence anyone's pattern of consumption, comparatively little work exists on how this process operates. The paper will be illustrated by some secondary analysis of the British Household Panel Survey. The BHPS has a panel of approximately 10,000 people who have been interviewed annually since 1991. It analyses aspects of individual consumption in relation to people's associational involvement and friendship ties. The data is explored in the context of debates about social capital, attempting to apply the concept in order to analyse recreational practices. It is argued that social capital is a flawed concept and that greater appreciation of the complexity and diversity of network ties is required to understand how personal connections influence consumption.

Taking into account this social dimension of leisure, contacts with known people and participation in associations (understood as two dimensions of social capital, namely: informal and formal sociability), are resources that can be used to develop social leisure. Furthermore, variables such as household type and marital status should also be relevant in the sense that individuals may prefer to enjoy leisure with their closest relatives. However, since many of those activities may lie in the boundaries between leisure experience and household maintenance (depending on a personal appreciation which might also vary with time), we cannot hypothesize a clear effect. Empirical evidence with German panel data (GSOEP) reports a tendency for people to enjoy their leisure time most when they live alone (Van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2004).

The level of satisfaction with one's leisure experience is lastly affected by other personal variables, which mainly capture individual's heterogeneity. In this sense, it is important to take into account the relevance of both tastes (as each agent define the boundaries of her own 'leisure experience') and skills (since she implements an optimal allocation of resources given a technology to produce and consume that leisure experience). Individual's age and gender are some of the factors, which are likely to affect one's evaluation of her own leisure experience. Empirical evidence suggests a u-shaped behaviour of the age regressor and a greater level of leisure satisfaction among men (Van Praag, and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2004). When controlling for age, we are allowing for distinct satisfaction statements to depend on different life moments. In this way, our estimation can accommodate the extent to which past experiences and expectations for the future operates in the comparison between effectively enjoyed leisure and desired leisure. Further, we include subjective social class as a proxy for people's status (being this a socio-economic concept with multiple dimensions). We believe, that the level of individual leisure satisfaction and the reported definition of one's social class are not independent areas as they may capture personal self-perceptions and habits (which potentially brings into the model additional unobserved individual heterogeneity).

Finally, although individual socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics seem clear determinants of individual's leisure experience satisfaction, we have to take a look at environmental factors. Some environmental conditio