Relationships among the Characteristics of Serious Leisure, Group Cohesion, and Leisure Involvement in Volunteer Interpreters

Abstract

Volunteer interpreters play an important communicative role in the leisure and recreation of tourists; interpreter services build bridges among tourists, administrative institutions and leisure resources. An important issue in this field involves the continuation of the involvement of volunteer interpreters in their guidance tasks. Therefore, this study explored the relationship between serious leisure and group cohesion on a personal level, as well as their relationships with leisure involvement. We used volunteer interpreters from non-profit organizations as the research sample, and surveyed 34 non-profit organizations. We also used convenience sampling in distributing questionnaires, and acquired 394 valid samples. We used the method of partial least squares (PLS) to analyze the relationships among variables. Results showed that the characteristics of serious leisure in volunteer interpreters would positively affect group cohesion and leisure involvement, and that group cohesion would positively affect leisure involvement and had a mediation affect in the model.