The relationship of leisure occupation, personality, and well-being: A comparison of model builders and visual artists

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current study was designed to compare participants in two superficially similar leisure occupations: building scale models and creating visual art. A sample of 44 modelers and 44 artists was recruited from online sources and completed an online survey consisting of a measure of intrinsic motivation, two measures of personality, and several measures of well-being. Participants also answered several open-ended questions about their leisure occupation. The results indicated that modelers and artists often have very different motivations for engaging in similar behaviors. For example, both groups engage in research before beginning a project, but modelers do so to increase the accuracy of their model and artists to find details they can incorporate into their imaginal designs. Further, modelers were somewhat more intrinsically motivated than artists and were more satisfied with their lives. In contrast, the artists reported more symptoms of depression and they perceived themselves as more stressed than the modelers. There were also differences in personality: modelers scored higher on Holland’s (1973, 1996) Realistic and Investigative types whereas the artists scored higher on Holland’s Artistic, Social, and Enterprising types and on the Big Five dimensions of Openness and Neuroticism. These results suggest that an individual’s choice of leisure occupation may influence well-being and that the choice of leisure occupation could be guided in part by personality tests, though further work is needed to identify all of the factors involved in the choice of leisure occupation and the influence of such occupations on well-being.