Abstract
This study explored the extent to which adolescents’ motives for leisure activity participation are related to their perceptions of competence and relatedness in different kinds of activities and aimed to provide new insight into boys’ and girls’ leisure experiences and their motivational orientations for activity participation. These proposed associations were based on previous empirical work and the theoretical frameworks of motive disposition approach and were tested in a nationally representative sample of Norwegian adolescents (N=3273) aged 15 and 16 years (51.8% boys) from the World Health Organization’s cross-sectional survey, Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children 2005/06. The findings in the current study supported the hypothesis regarding matched correlations between specific motives and specific outcomes in that the adolescents seem to get (perceived competence and relatedness) what they want (competence and social motives) within leisure activities. Furthermore, the analysis using structural equation modeling indicated different motivational orientations in types of leisure activity participation between girls and boys, although the mediating effects of leisure activity participation in different types of activities were not significant.
Highlights
Participation in leisure activities, and especially in organized activities, has been considered in several studies to be a possible contributor to well-being and good mental health [1,2,3,4,5,6]
These proposed associations were based on previous empirical work and the theoretical frameworks of motive disposition approach and were tested in a nationally representative sample of Norwegian adolescents (N = 3273) aged 15 and 16 years (51.8% boys) from the World Health Organization’s crosssectional survey, Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children 2005/06
The most significant gender differences were found for social motive items
Summary
Participation in leisure activities, and especially in organized activities, has been considered in several studies to be a possible contributor to well-being and good mental health [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The current study assesses the association between adolescents’ self-reported participation in leisure activities, their motives for participation, and their perceptions of competence and relatedness in the activities. Adolescents may perceive various motives for participation in leisure activities, and different motives may underlie the selection of specific activities. A frequent motive reported by adolescents for participation in both sport and art activities is socialization with peers [8, 9]. As a fundamental motivation in itself, the need to belong and form social attachments should stimulate goal-directed activity to satisfy it [11]. Leisure activities represent a core arena for being social with peers and friends
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