Contextualizing Leisure Research to Encompass Complexity in Lived Leisure Experience: The Need for Creative Analytic Practice

Abstract

Many qualitative manuscripts published on the phenomenon of leisure remain post positivist privileging the traditional scientific method as the way of conducting and representing research. Such traditional approaches to research lead to debates about whether interpretative accounts can accurately, adequately, directly, or completely capture, depict, describe, or portray social life. In response to this crisis of representation, many leisure scholars have adopted creative analytic practice (CAP), which allows for the creation of imaginative and creative representation including autoethnography, fiction stories, visual images, poetry, experimental media, and performance. CAP reflects a deliberate attempt to demonstrate that the processes and products of qualitative inquiry are inextricably linked. CAP purposefully engages issues connected to subjectivity, authority, authorship, reflexivity, and representational form.