Leisure as a Psychological State and Experience

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Chapter 4

• Leisure as a Psychological State and Experience
• (????????????)

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Studying Leisure States and Experiences A
Mind or a Mine Field?
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Forewords

• To understand the impact of leisure on health,
  well-being, and other domains of daily life, the
  researchers not only have to be able to assess
  what people do in their leisure but also how they
  construe and feel about what they do.

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Three Questions

• First, what is the actual nature of the
  experience that accompanies participation? That
  is, what are the participants feeling and
  thinking during an episode and how can
  researchers observe and measure the texture and
  quality of their experience?
• Second, is the involvement construed as leisure
  by the participant, or does an observer of the
  incident only think they are experiencing
  leisure?
• Third, what satisfactions are derived from this
  activity, setting or experience?

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Three Strategies for Measuring Leisure
Experiences

• The immediate conscious experience approach
  (???????) involves monitoring the actual,
  on-site, real time nature of experiences
  accompanying engagement in leisure activities or
  settings.
• The definitional approach (???) focuses on the
  criteria used by participant in judging or
  construing activities, settings, or experiences
  to be leisure.
• The post-hoc satisfaction approach (?????) deals
  with the satisfactions associated with the
  experience based on the extent to which the needs
  and expectations of the participants are met by
  involvement in the activity, setting, or by the
  experience itself.

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Immediate Conscious Experience Approach The
Texture of Leisure (???????? ????? )
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Properties of a leisure Experience (???????)

• Immediate conscious experience (??????) is the
  experience of the present moment.
• The stream of consciousness (?????) can be
  described as the flow of perception, purposeful
  thoughts, fragmentary images, distant
  recollections, bodily sensations, emotions,
  plans, wishes, and impossible fantasiesit is our
  experience of life, our own personal life, from
  its beginning to its end (Pope Singer, 1978).

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Properties of a leisure Experience (cont)

• See table 4.1 (p. 84-85)
• Emotions, moods, arousal, activation, relaxation,
  cognitions, time duration, concentration, focus
  of attention, absorption, self-consciousness,
  self-awareness, ego-loss, sense of competence,
  sense of freedom

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Good or Optimal Leisure Experiences (??????)

• Good leisure experiences may better contribute to
  well-being and happiness.
• What is a good leisure experience? Is it
  characterized by higher positive moods, greater
  intensity or a relaxed feeling, the experience of
  time going quickly or slowly, greater absorption,
  lesser or greater self-conscious, or other
  criteria?

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Good or Optimal Leisure Experiences (cont)

• de Grazias (1964) view of leisure as a special
  state of being. He argued that the possession of
  free time, or participation in a recreational
  activity is no guarantee that one will experience
  leisure.
• Cohen (1979) suggests that profound leisure
  experience are hard to realize for all but a
  special few.

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Leisure and free time live in two different
worlds. Anybody can have free time. Not everybody
can have leisure. Leisure refers to a state of
being, a condition of man, which few desire and
fewer achieve. (de Grazia, 1964)
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Good or Optimal Leisure Experiences (cont)

• Though what constitutes a legitimate leisure
  experience (??????) is debatable, the view that
  leisure leads to an optimal experience (????) has
  been a prevalent theme in theory and research
  during the past decade.
• Optimal experience are states of high
  psychological involvement or absorption (????) in
  activities or setting.
• Maslows (1968) notion of peak experience (????)
  and Csikszentmihalyis concept of flow have been
  particularly attractive conceptualizations for
  leisure researchers.

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Good or Optimal Leisure Experiences (cont)

• Maslow (1968) describes peak experiences as
  moment of highest happiness and fulfillment
  (???) often achieved through the nature
  experience, aesthetic perception, creative
  movement, intellectual insight, organismic
  experience, athletic pursuit, and the like.
• Csikszentmihalyi suggested that flow is the
  experience individuals frequently seek in their
  various activities and that leisure and play
  activities and settings can be excellent sources
  of flow.

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Good or Optimal Leisure Experiences (cont)

• Involvement in leisure activities and settings
  does not guarantee flow will be experienced. The
  correct choices must be made and certain
  conditions must be present in the activity or
  setting.
• Csikszentmihalyi (1990) suggested that flow
  experiences are the best moments of people
  lives and occur when a persons body or mind is
  stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to
  accomplish something difficult and worthwhile .

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????????
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Good or Optimal Leisure Experiences (cont)

• One cannot enjoy doing the same thing at the same
  level for long. People grow bored or frustrated
  and then the desire to enjoy themselves again
  pushes them to stretch their skills, or to
  discover new opportunities for using them.
• Flow model allows for the recognition that the
  experience does not have to all-or-nothing and
  that the degree of flow can vary from modest
  involvement to intense peak-like involvement.

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On-Site Surveys of Moods Leisure In Outdoor
Areas and Other Settings (???????)

• Multi-phase experience (??????)
• 1.anticipation (??)a period of imagining and
  planning the trip
• 2.travel to (??)going to the recreation site
• 3.on-site (??)the actual activity or experience
  at the site
• 4.travel back (??)the return trip home
• 5.recollection (??)the recall or memory of the
  activity or experience.

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Moods During a Visit to a Park

• See figure 4.2 (p.93)

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On-Site Surveys of Moods Leisure In Outdoor
Areas and Other Settings (cont)

• Hammit (1980) points out that there is a need to
  consider many recreation engagement as a package
  deal all parts having a potential role.
• Depending on the length or nature of the leisure
  activityfor example, vacations and going to the
  movies would be quite different-the various phase
  may take on greater or lesser importance in
  influencing the leisure experience.

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Experiments Leisure Experience in the Lab

• For the example, see figure 4.3-4.5 (p. 95-99)
• This study demonstrates that perceiving a leisure
  activity as freely chosen has a strong influences
  on the quality of the resulting experience, here
  defined as the level of flow.
• The more competitive conditions in this
  experiment also caused the participants to become
  more involved.

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Experiential Sampling Method (?????)Experiencing
Leisure in Life

• Experiential sampling method is used to monitor
  not only what people do during their everyday
  lives, but to measure the psychological states
  and experiences that accompany this daily
  activity.
• Also, this method is used to uncover the
  regularities in perceptions and feelings of
  happiness, self-awareness, concentration, and
  other characteristics of conscious experience in
  various settings including work and leisure.

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Experiential Sampling MethodExperiencing
Leisure in Life (cont)

• Typically, respondents carry electronic pagers
  with them and are randomly signaled seven to nine
  times throughout the day for a period of one
  week.
• Each time, the pager emits a signal, the
  respondents take out a booklet of brief
  questionnaires (experiential sampling forms, or
  ESF) and complete a series of open- and
  close-ended items indicating their current
  activity, the social and physical context of
  their activity, and their psychological state.

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Experiential Sampling Form (ESF)

• See figure 4.6-4.8 (p. 102-105)
• Leisure activities had only slightly higher
  levels of concentration and perceived challenge
  than maintenance activities and considerably
  lower levels than productive activities.
• The researchers point out that these findings are
  consistent with the view that leisure is
  relaxing, but it also suggests that the leisure
  activities of adolescents rarely require much in
  terms of effort and attention or what might be
  called flow.

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Definitional Approach Leisure in the Eye of the
Beholder(????????)
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Criteria Necessary for Something To Be Construed
as Leisure (??????????)

• The definitional approach to the study of the
  leisure experience is characterized by theory and
  research which attempt to identify the attributes
  or properties of an activity, setting or
  experience that lead people to construe it as
  leisure.
• First, the most central and commonly agreed upon
  set of attributes is associated with freedom (??)
  or a lack of constraints (????).

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Criteria Necessary for Something To Be Construed
as Leisure (cont)

• Second, activities, settings, and experiences
  construed as leisure are likely to be perceived
  as providing opportunities for the development of
  competence, self-expression, self-development, or
  self-realization.
• Third, this set of attributes is based on the
  nature and quality of experience derived from
  participation. When an engagement is experienced
  as enjoyable, relaxed, escaped, adventurous,
  spontaneous(?????), fantastic, fun or
  pleasurable, it is more likely to be construed as
  leisure.

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Qualitative Approaches Participants Talk about
Leisure

• The most common attributes are a sense of
  separation from the everyday world freedom of
  choice in ones actions a feeling of pleasure
  spontaneity timeless fantasy a sense of
  adventure and exploration and self-realization
  (Gunter, 1987).
• Henderson (1990) found that old women, who had
  worked hard all their lives, typically found
  leisure-like experiences in their work and family
  obligations even though the women saw themselves
  as having had little or no leisure.

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Qualitative Approaches Participants Talk about
Leisure (cont)

• Shaw (1984) found that leisure were characterized
  by the perception that the activities had been
  freely chosen and intrinsic motivated.
• She also found that feelings of enjoyment,
  relaxation, and a lack of evaluation by other
  people were associated with those activities her
  respondents construed as leisure.

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Quasi-Experiment Imagining Leisure

• Iso-Ahola (1979) used a quasi-experimental design
  (?????) and had the participants imagine
  themselves engaging in a recreational activity
  during their free time.
• Iso-Ahola indicated that the perception of
  leisure was significantly greater when perceived
  freedom was high than when it was low, when
  participation was intrinsically rather than
  extrinsically motivated, and when the leisure
  activity was unrelated rather than related to
  work.

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Experiential Sampling Method You Call It--
Leisure or Nonleisure

• Samdahl (1988) demonstrated that when people
  perceived that they had chosen to participate in
  an activity independently of the expectations of
  other people (low role constraint) and they were
  more likely to construe and rate the activity or
  situation as leisure and experience positive
  moods.

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Experiential Sampling Method You Call It--
Leisure or Nonleisure (cont)

• Samdhal and Jekubivich (1993) contended that
  leisure was not left to chance(???????).
  Leisure was found to be important to many people,
  and positive leisure experiences occurred as a
  result of active negotiation (????) and
  interaction (??) with the social contexts that
  comprised their daily lives.

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A Final Note on the Subjective Nature of Leisure

• Perceived freedom and intrinsic motivation seem
  to be extremely important to human mental and
  physical health, and they also just happen to be
  at the core of what people see as leisure
  (???????).

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The End... Thank You!
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