Form Of Serious Leisure Research Articles

Women, climbing and serious leisure

In this paper, the notion of serious leisure is critically explored in relation to women's climbing careers and identities. It draws upon findings from an in‐depth qualitative study of 19 women climbers and explores the concept of serious leisure from a gender perspective, arguing that in order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of serious leisure, it is important to situate participation in the social, cultural and political contexts that frame experience. Drawing on the theoretical work of Aitchison, Shaw and Wearing, we use a feminist theoretical approach that recognises both collective experiences of gender, focusing on inequality, as well as a post‐structuralist engagement with difference and identities. The data identified the central significance of physicality, social relationships and motherhood in the experiences of, and motivations for, the women's participation in climbing as a form of serious leisure. It is argued that understanding the relationship between climbing and the women's wider lives, specifically their work, attitudes to childbearing, sexual relationships, gender identities and motherhood is central to understanding their commitment to climbing.

The Link between Successful Aging and Serious Leisure

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine whether engagement in a serious leisure activity provided older adults opportunities for successful aging. Data were collected through in-depth interviews at shag dance festivals in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. To provide structure for the interview, a general interview guide consisting of open-ended questions was used. A total of 31 interviews were conducted with 25 individuals and 6 couples, between 60 and 82 years of age. During the analysis stage, the constant comparative method was used to analyze the data. Themes that emerged support the idea that shag dancing is a form of serious leisure for older adults and support the role of serious leisure in successful aging. The narratives provided by the informants illustrate the powerful role serious leisure can play in an individual's life and point toward the value of serious leisure as an approach that holds promise for recreators working to help older individuals experience successful aging.

Getting Onboard: Women, Access and Serious Leisure

This paper explores women's experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women's ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women's agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention given to how women may first negotiate the complexity of their gendered lives to gain access to these sites and experiences. By drawing on the accounts of forty women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps, a form of serious leisure, this paper argues that accessing leisure is still an important aspect of women's leisure experiences. Women cited here engage in active and conscious practices and performances to both justify their access to leisure and to enable their disengagement from demands associated with normative femininity. This paper concludes that to sideline questions of access serves to conceptually dislocate leisure from the wider patterns of women's everyday lives and limits our understanding of how women perceive, use and give meaning to their serious leisure participation.

Costs and rewards in barbershop singing

Barbershop singing is a hobbyist form of serious leisure which, like other hobbies and amateur pursuits, has its own pattern of costs and rewards that is characteristic of the activity. To discover this pattern, observations were made of the principal activities of four male and female barbershop chapters in Calgary and interviews undertaken with 32 of their members. The object of the larger study was to develop a grounded theory of barbershop singing as serious leisure using a qualitative-exploratory research design. That part of the study reported here deals with the rewards and thrills of barbershop, which are compared with its costs: the disappointments, dislikes, and tensions. Overall, barbershop singers find a substantial ‘profit’ after weighing these positives and negatives, which indicates that, in their hobby, the bitter is well-offset by the sweet.