Project-based Leisure Research Articles

How meeting with the horse may contribute to a balanced life: Co-constructing a project-based leisure

This article offers a praxiography of equine-assisted activities, defined as a particular form of project-based leisure. The article stems from a larger study whose main purpose was to work closely with collaborators, equicoaches, and horses, to co-construct activities to support work–life boundary management. The collection of data involved 27 interviews, several focus groups, and approximately 50 hours of participant observation. To make the activities more inclusive, the analysis integrates a diverse group of actors, both human and equine, allowing the authors to gain a better understanding of situated learning mechanisms emerging from multispecies relations. The analysis highlights the role of performative processes and ontological work organized around human–animal relationship building. The authors propose that this study is part of a movement in favor of the coexistence of living beings and that this is a central matter of concern shared by the collaborators involved in this project.

‘This was like some Little House on the Prairie shit’: The intensive care(work) of making PPE during COVID-19

In March 2020 during the first wave of COVID-19 in the United States, the national supply and distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE) was dangerously underwhelming. Skilled volunteer quilters, sewists and 3D printer enthusiasts emerged in a groundswell of life-saving gendered disaster response, creating face masks, ear savers, and face shields. Making PPE was both tiring and comforting, a distraction from, and solution to, the pandemic, revealing the tense overlap between volunteering and project-based leisure opportunities. Qualitative data collected from July 2020 to January 2021 demonstrate PPE makers engaging in carework for the self—turning to a chosen leisure activity to relieve anxiety and provide a needed momentary distraction from the pandemic, and carework for others—constructing and distributing PPE for those in need.

Leisure and The Motive: Theories of Serious, Casual and Project-Based Leisure

Pembahasan tentang volunteerism hingga saat ini masih jarang dikaji secara mendalam. Padahal, volunteerism menjadi isu yang sering diperbincangkan oleh masyarakat modern saat ini. Buku-buku yang secara khusus membahas teori tentang volunteer masih sedikit jumlahnya, bahkan hingga saat ini belum ada pusat data dan informasi yang diperuntukkan secara khusus guna menghimpun karya ilmiah terkait topik tersebut. Selama puluhan tahun teori tentang volunteer mengarah pada perspektif ekonomi, hingga akhirnya muncul Robert A. Stebbins yang berupaya melawan arus dengan mengkritisi teori lama dan mengembangkan teori tersebut melalui leisure perspective .

Community Social Involvement in Academic Retirement: Finding Sociological Meaning in Free Time

Leaving an academic post by retiring (from teaching, research, academic administration) is to leave in later life a main, wider-community social involvement. Retirement from this occupational heaven can lead to an incongruous lifestyle, however, to a lonely, unsettling existence, even with compatible spouse, family, and close friends near at hand. For they cannot usually offer the values of academia. They fail to generate the feeling of being part of the larger community, of being somebody within it. There are three ways to recover this loss, each realized in leisure time, namely, serious leisure, casual leisure, and project-based leisure. Informal community social involvement refers to informal involvements of a fortnightly or monthly nature. Irregular community social involvement consists of local formal involvements that are pursued from time to time. Regular community social involvement refers to membership and steady member participation in local and extra-local formal organizations. For academic retirees in search of community involvement, becoming immersed in the social world of a serious leisure activity is possibly the most effective way to establish beyond the circle of one’s intimates just who one is.

An Unlikely Retirement: The 2017 Las Vegas Massacre as an Exercise in Project-Based Deviant Leisure

In recent years, homicide scholarship has been the beneficiary of an increasingly interdisciplinary framework that has come to include a leisure science perspective in attempting to explain murder as a pleasure-seeking avocation for offenders. In this article, the authors employ a leisure-based approach to the Las Vegas Massacre as a foundational case study on multiple murder as project-based deviant leisure. Homicidal leisure-based projects, as suggested here, may also amount to intuitive extensions of other higher-risk hobbies known as edgework. A leisure approach to understanding some forms of multiple murder provides valuable new insights while also integrating important tradition.

Application of the Serious Leisure Perspective to Intrinsically Motivated Serial Homicide

ABSTRACTThis article briefly introduces the multidisciplinary field of leisure sciences before exploring how leisure theory, particularly the Serious Leisure Perspective, can provide important insights into better understanding some forms of serial homicide. It is well known that many serial homicide offenders kill for the pleasure and enjoyment that such behavior provides them. Such expressive cases can be understood as deviant casual, serious, or project-based leisure experience, which helps account for how particular offenders plan, structure, and experience their crimes. Examples of specific serial homicide cases that appear to function primarily as casual, serious, or project-based leisure are presented and discussed.

Leisure and the positive psychological states

Positive psychology and the study of leisure of leisure have more in common than meets the eye. Their shared ground is especially evident in the concept of leisure activity: a type of pursuit, wherein participants in it mentally or physically (often both) think or do something, motivated by the hope of achieving a desired end. Leisure activities are positive activities, identified psychologically by particular sets of behaviors and sociologically by their place in a leisure social world and often in a social institution (e.g. sport, art, entertainment). Leisure is defined and the concept of leisure experience examined. Next, the serious leisure perspective is introduced. The main part of the article explores the emotions of leisure experience in interpersonal relationships, contemplation/spirituality, volunteering, quality of life/well-being, happiness, and play and creativity. The serious pursuits offer the richest range of positive psychological states, but casual and project-based leisure are not to be ignored.

Self-directed learning as a basis for complex leisure

Self-directed learning (SDL) is intentional self-planned activity where the individual is clearly in control of this process. Such learning may be formal (here it would be synonymous with adult education), but most often, it is informal. There are many areas of human life where it is practiced. In leisure, three critical questions emerge. One, how does SDL vary across the serious leisure perspective, including project-based leisure? Two, how does SDL vary across the life course and how does it relate to lifelong learning? Three, what role does SDL play in the larger society? Other areas of concern covered in this article include SDL and the quality of information, Internet, and digital technology, and leisure literacy as an aspect of leisure education. Finally, it is argued that SDL constitutes a distinctive component of leisure, when the latter is conceived of as a major domain for experiencing freedom.

Mephitic projects: a forensic leisure science analysis of the BTK serial murders

Although it has been suggested among both forensic experts and a small number of leisure scientists that serial murder may be a form of recreational leisure, such suggestions remain largely unexplored both theoretically and empirically. Given the absence of scholarship on this possibility, this project explored and analyzed the structure and function of leisure activities within an unusual case (Dennis Rader) of serial murder. A thorough analysis of relevant case documents confirmed that serial murder itself can be experienced by the killer as a form of recreational leisure with the potential for optimal psychological experience (flow), and that various leisure activities may function in specific ways within the serial murder process. An unexpected finding in this case was that leisure, specifically project-based leisure, served to structure specific killings. Findings provide valuable new insights for forensics behavioral experts that may be used to guide future research.

Initiating and continuing participation in citizen science for natural history.

BackgroundNatural history has a long tradition in the UK, dating back to before Charles Darwin. Developing from a principally amateur pursuit, natural history continues to attract both amateur and professional involvement. Within the context of citizen science and public engagement, we examine the motivations behind citizen participation in the national survey activities of the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) programme, looking at: people’s experiences of the surveys as ‘project-based leisure’; their motivations for taking part and barriers to continued participation; where they feature on our continuum of engagement; and whether participation in an OPAL survey facilitated their movement between categories along this continuum. The paper focuses on a less-expected but very significant outcome regarding the participation of already-engaged amateur naturalists in citizen science.ResultsOur main findings relate to: first, how committed amateur naturalists (already-engaged) have also enjoyed contributing to OPAL and the need to respect and work with their interest to encourage broader and deeper involvement; and second, how new (previously-unengaged) and relatively new participants (casually-engaged) have gained confidence, renewed their interests, refocussed their activities and/or gained validation from participation in OPAL. Overall, we argue that engagement with and enthusiasm for the scientific process is a motivation shared by citizens who, prior to participating in the OPAL surveys, were previously-unengaged, casually-engaged or already-engaged in natural history activities.ConclusionsCitizen science has largely been written about by professional scientists for professional scientists interested in developing a project of their own. This study offers a qualitative example of how citizen science can be meaningful to participants beyond what might appear to be a public engagement data collection exercise.

The lived experience of London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games volunteers: a serious leisure perspective

Along with other sporting mega-events, the Olympic Games, in all its versions, makes extensive use of volunteers. The 70,000 London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic volunteers, for example, played a vital role in the delivery of the event. Stebbins’ theoretical perspective of serious leisure includes consideration of volunteering and there are calls for its further empirical evaluation. This study, therefore, uses a qualitative study of the lived experience of London 2012 volunteers to test the relevance of the serious leisure framework to Olympic volunteering. The data are drawn from the reflective diaries of 20 participants who volunteered in a variety of roles during London 2012. It is concluded that all of the qualities of serious leisure are identifiable to various extents within the experiences of the London 2012 volunteers. This finding will help Olympic and other sporting mega-event managers to understand and improve the experiences of their volunteers. Recommendations are also made, in the light of the findings, for the further refinement of the serious leisure perspective. Particular attention is paid to highlighting how the findings might contribute to recent debates around whether sporting mega-event volunteering is best explained by the serious leisure quality of career volunteering, or by the serious leisure associated concept of project-based leisure, or alternatively by the competing term of episodic volunteering.

Higher skilled working tourists and their leisure lifestyles: a qualitative study of guest language instructors in South Korea

Using interviews conducted with 24 higher skilled working tourists employed as guest language instructors in the Republic of Korea, this paper explores how working tourists could secure an optimal leisure lifestyle in their host countries. Three key findings emerged. First, the respondents were seeking casual, touristic, amateur, hobby and volunteer leisure with their colleagues and with their host community members. But, the rewards and episodic aspects of their leisure, including formal and informal language development, suggested that it incorporated variations in project-based leisure as a core characteristic. Second, these respondents were taking part in guest, host and leisure speech communities that were each offering leisure choices. However, their leisure lifestyle was best when leisure, second language development and acculturation coincided in a leisure speech community. Third, that in a leisure speech community, respondents’ acculturation and friendships improved more so than in either guest or host speech communities. Also, that these respondents’ formal and informal second language learning within their leisure speech communities was essential for an optimal leisure lifestyle. The paper determines that leisure speech communities, occurring along a continuum of monetary, educational and interpersonal resources, could affect the linguistic mobility of higher skilled working tourists. It recommends that future research could examine if a sociolinguistics of leisure could assist in exploring and mapping the leisure lifestyles appearing among mobile populations in a globalising world.

Integrating flow theory and the serious leisure perspective into mental health counseling

This article explores how flow theory and the serious leisure perspective (SLP) can be integrated into mental health counseling. Although different counseling models have acknowledged the role of leisure in the counseling process, leisure is largely an unknown and superficial concept in the mental health counseling literature. Four broad-based pragmatic ideas regarding how flow theory and the SLP can be integrated into the counseling process include mental health counselors (1) understanding the concepts of serious leisure, casual leisure, project-based leisure, flow (enjoyment), and hedonistic pleasure; (2) becoming aware of various assessment instruments that measure flow and serious leisure; (3) using the provision characteristics of entering flow into the counseling process; and (4) empowering clients to becoming community change agents through serious leisure pursuit, resulting in flow experiences.

O Lazer Sério de Robert A. Stebbins


 
 
 
 O presente artigo visa apresentar o serious leisure, do sociólogo Robert A. Stebbins. Trata-se de uma proposição teórica sobre uma forma de lazer que, aliada a outras duas formas – casual leisure e project-based leisure –, constituem uma perspectiva teórica mais ampla. Apresentamos uma síntese de cada uma dessas três formas e acrescentamos um levantamento inicial que fizemos sobre os estudos brasileiros que se utilizaram dessa teoria em suas análises sobre atividades de lazer. O objetivo é oferecer dados iniciais para interessados em desenvolver estudos sobre o serious leisure ou mesmo sobre as outras duas formas de lazer. Também visamos acrescentar elementos que podem ser úteis às discussões sobre atividades que poucas vezes são enfocadas através de teorias classicamente utilizadas no Brasil. Por fim, tecemos nossas considerações sobre a relativa ausência de uma perspectiva sobre o lazer, a do serious leisure que entendemos como merecedora de atenção, compreensão e análise, visando incrementar amplamente o desenvolvimento e os debates sobre os estudos do lazer no Brasil. 
 
 
 

Promoting sustainable food and food citizenship through an adult education leisure experience

This action research project investigates a community-based, participatory learning approach to promoting sustainable food choices and food citizenship through a project-based leisure experience. Drawing on understandings from radical adult education, community-based social marketing and practice theory, a project-based leisure experience was designed, implemented and assessed. This experience involved volunteers hosting friends for a sustainable meal in their homes. The meal included guided activities, critical reflection on food system issues, values-based dialogue and written commitments to shift habits. A combination of participant observations, surveys and follow-up qualitative interviews indicated that the meal program had an influence on those involved, shifting habits and increasing sustainable food choices. Changes seemed owing to increases in motivation that were anchored in reflection on personal values rather than on a reduction in external barriers. A synthesis of the empirical findings and literature suggests five key characteristics of an adult education approach to project-based leisure that can facilitate food citizenship: personal social context, engaged experiences, social norms, social networks and community-based resources.

Robert A. Stebbins, The Committed Reader: Reading for Utility, Pleasure, and Fulfillment in the Twenty-First Century

Robert A. Stebbins, The Committed Reader: Reading Utility, Pleasure, and Fulfillment in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2013, 143 pp., $40.00 paper (9780-8108-8596-7). I was at once intrigued by the title of Robert Stebbins' The Committed Reader, especially having received the book review in the midst of reading undergraduate final exams. The full title, suggesting a focus on the various types of reading we engage in and encounter in the 21st century, deepened my interest. After all, most of what we sociologists do involves the varieties of reading included in the subtitle: our research and teaching spread across reading utility, pleasure, and fulfilment; we strive to teach our students how to go beyond the mere Google-style of reading to engage with texts; and our plans sabbatical almost always, if unofficially, include finally reading for pleasure. It is unfortunate, then, that the lead of the title regarding the committed reader ends up disappearing in this work, leaving it more encyclopaedic in its approach to reading and readership than committed. Stebbins' approach in this work derives from a combination of library and information studies and the application of his own leisure perspective. That perspective, which starts from a definition of leisure as uncoerced, contextually framed activity engaged in during free time, which people want to do and, using their abilities and resources, actually do in either a satisfying or a fulfilling way (or both) (p. 24), is then opened up to classify three approaches to leisure activity (casual serious pursuits, or project-based leisure). After briefly addressing casual and project-based forms of Stebbins goes on to break down the category of serious pursuits into leisure, with three subcategories (amateur, volunteer, and hobbyist), and devotee work. The rest of the work of this book reflects the application of Stebbins' serious leisure perspective to the contact points between a variety of sociological factors and the types of reading mentioned in the title. So, instance, Stebbins' analysis of pleasure reading engages with a variety of purposes reading, including entertainment, imaginative play, as a trigger conversation, sensory stimulation, relaxation, and information or knowledge. Included in the discussion of each of these purposes are a range of sociological touch points, including the classification of forms of fiction and nonfiction pleasurable reading materials, the roles of entertainment and edutainment in society, and the social-psychological and societal benefits of pleasurable reading. Most of the data that provides the basis the analysis here is drawn from either governmental surveys and censuses or from a wide range of secondary research in the sociology of culture and library and information studies areas. The approach to the three other forms of reading proceeds in a similar manner. It should be noted that I would call Stebbins' serious leisure perspective taxonomic rather than phenomenological one very important reason--this work is oriented more to the identification of various types and constitutive elements of action (in this case, reading) rather than the subjective experience of those actional forms. This work reads more akin to a Weberian approach, a la his analysis of the ideal-types of social action, or the work of Diderot and the Encyclopedists, rather than approaching its topic in a manner closer to Merleau-Ponty or Schutz. It is precisely in this approach that I believe both the strength and the weakness of Stebbins' work lie. Its strength is this taxonomic effort. For readers who are interested in such a breakdown of the various approaches to the act of reading and their sociological and social-psychological touchpoints, this work will be a very useful contribution to their libraries. The intersection of Stebbins' serious leisure perspective and library and information studies will also be of interest to LIS scholars, as it could present a useful guide understanding and analyzing the approaches readers bring to bear on the act of reading and, to extrapolate wildly, of potentially reorganizing institutional and informational resources so as to meet the needs of readers more effectively. …

Routine and Project-Based Leisure, Happiness, and Meaning in Life

The search for happiness and life meaning is an ancient quest. Positive psychology has brought this topic to the forefront of modern research. Previous research has shown that meaning and happiness can be found through one's vocation and through leisure pursuits. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of routine and project-based leisure experiences on meaning and happiness. Three-hundred and five college students participated in the study. Structural equation modeling and regression analyses revealed significant relationships between meaning, happiness, and routine leisure pursuits. Social engagement, personal reflection, and time spent outdoors were potent predictors of happiness and meaning. Implications for the leisure field are discussed in light of these findings and other relevant research.

Compromiso temporal discrecional: efectos sobre la elección y el estilo de ocio

This paper introduces and elaborates the concept of discretionary time commitment, defined as un-coerced, allocation of a certain number of minutes, hours, days, or other measure of time that a person devotes, or would like to devote, to carrying out an activity. Discretionary time commitment finds expression in leisure and the agreeable sides of work (which, in effect, are experienced as leisure). The kinds of time commitments people make help shape their work and leisure lifestyles, thus constituting part of the patterning of those lifestyles. In leisure the nature of such commitments varies substantially across its three forms: serious, casual, and project-based leisure. In the field of leisure studies “time use” is generally treated of as an objective idea. Unlike the term “discretionary time commitment,” it commonly connotes no subjective sense of personal agency or intentionality (to allocate time, set aside time, etc.).

The Importance of Tourism Motivations Among Sport Event Volunteers at the 2007 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, Stuttgart, Germany

The main aim of this research is to explore the importance of tourism within the motivation of volunteers, focusing on a case study of the 2007 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Stuttgart, Germany. Volunteers have mostly been ignored as a subject of research in almost all fields and there is a need for a deeper understanding of the diverse nature of sport event volunteer tourism. The study on 225 volunteers at the Championships investigated a range of 50 motivations framed by Pearce's (2005) Travel Career Pattern, as well as Snyder's (1993) Volunteer Function Inventory, Farell et al.'s (1998) volunteer classification and Stebbins' (1992) work on serious and project-based leisure. Overall, the results indicated volunteer-based motivations that are generally more important than the tourism-based considerations. The age and gender of the volunteers had an influence on more of the volunteer-based motives compared with tourism. A considerable proportion of volunteers perceived themselves to be a tourist, and there was a desire to further take part in tourism activities, in addition to their volunteering duties, while at the event. Destination managers and volunteer event co-ordinators should be aware that the link to tourism may strategically help to increase commitment and experience satisfaction levels among the volunteers, who are less obvious and thus a potential tourism market.

The Semiotic Self and Serious Leisure

Examinations of the self and leisure are uncommon, not to mention those bearing on leisure and the semiotic self. The goal of this article is to help correct this deficiency. To this end, the serious leisure perspective is presented, followed by a discussion of how it is related to the semiotic self as formulated by Norbert Wiley. The principal vehicle by which this is accomplished is by way of the meaning of leisure. Moreover participants in serious leisure find there a powerfully attractive leisure career, an experience that is unavailable in the other two forms: casual and project-based leisure. This career frames the development of the semiotic self through leisure.