Ethnicity as a Construct in Leisure Research: A Rejoinder to Gobster

Abstract

Gobster addresses several issues in our paper. These include, first, a suggestion that the measure of cultural values that we used is not appropriate for understanding possible variations in racial and ethnic patterns of' outdoor leisure preferences and behavior. He claims, as well, that we limit our use of ethnicity to alleged cultural differences among groups and, specifically, to cultural values, unlike what most leisure researchers have done. Second, Gobster questions our concern with the use of common racial and ethnic labels because these are part and parcel of the way in which people look at others. Third, grouping people by racial and ethnic labels has often contributed to social justice. Fourth, ethnic groups in the U.S. are growing and what may have been small differences between groups in the past may be magnified in the future due to these demographic shifts. Fifth, research is constrained by resources that limit sampling designs and, therefore, collapsing smaller ethnic and/or racial groups into larger ones may be required for statistical comparisons of adequate power to be made. Sixth, Gobster expresses concern over our use of' cultural consensus analysis, a single method, in claiming that ethnicity may not be a useful concept. This naturally segues to concern over the culture construct itself and its worth in addressing alleged differences in the leisure behavior of nominal racial and ethnic groups. Finally, Gobster mentions the problem with (the low amount of) variance accounted for in studies of leisure participation, a concern that we expressed in our paper. We will deal with each of these issues in turn.