The Factors Affecting Life Satisfaction: Recreation Benefits and Quality of Life Perspectives

Abstract

Recreation research has evolved from three primary levels, including activities, settings and motivations to understand what, where and why people participating in recreation. The fourth level benefits are attracting more interests from recreation scholars and practitioners. Recreation benefits may contribute to enhance quality of life (QOL) and further life satisfaction for people. QOL is frequently used to evaluate the general well-being of individuals and societies. However, what kind of benefits would derive when people participated in recreation activity, and what factors would mostly contribute to people’s life satisfaction remains unknown. This study explored to identify the relationships among aforementioned factors in a context of forest recreation. In this study, seven hundred and sixty-seven visitors of Huisun National Forest Recreation Area in central Taiwan were involved for the survey with a 90% net response. First we analyzed the data with 17 beneficial measures. The results clearly showed three factors as we named health, introspection and learning benefits. Then we tested the reliability of measurement, which indicated that the measures demonstrated good reliability of instruments as shown from their Cronbach's alpha values. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that health benefits tended to be more important compared to introspection and learning benefits for people's life satisfaction. Furthermore, we found quality of life tended to contribute more on life satisfaction than those recreation benefits factors. We concluded that visitors' perceptions of health were salient regarding recreation benefits in forest recreation. Furthermore, recreation benefits and QOL predicted the life satisfaction effectively. The findings showed implications for recreation management, and also provided a platform for future studies.