Physically Active Leisure and Tourism Connection: Leisure Involvement and Choice of Tourism Activities Among Paddlers

Leisure and tourism activities may be integrally related for some. This study examined the relationship between the preferred leisure and tourism activities and psychological involvement in paddling of a group of paddlers. Participants were surveyed at the completion of a paddle tour. Data were analyzed using frequencies, confirmatory factor analysis, cross-tabulations, and ANOVA. Four types of leisure-tourism connection (LTC) were identified. People more highly involved with paddling tended to paddle while on vacation compared with other LTC types. The findings provide empirical evidence for previous assertions proposing a connection between involvement in leisure activities and subsequent tourism behaviors.     

The Relationship Between Father Involvement in Family Leisure and Family Functioning: The Importance of Daily Family Leisure

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between fathers’ involvement in family leisure and aspects of family functioning from both a father and young adolescent perspective. The sample consisted of fathers and their adolescent child from 647 families throughout the United States. Results from both the father and youth perspective indicated significant relationships between father involvement in both core and balance family leisure with family cohesion, family adaptability, and overall family functioning. Satisfaction with core family leisure that included the father's involvement was the single strongest predictor of all aspects of family functioning from both perspectives highlighting the importance of regularly occurring home-based family activities such as eating dinner together, participating in hobbies and informal sports or yard activities together, watching television together, or playing board games and video games together. Discussion and implications for fathers, families, practitioners, and future research are presented.     

The Influence of Leisure Involvement on Flow Experience During Hiking Activity: Using Psychological Commitment as a Mediate Variable

This study investigated the mediating role of psychological commitment in the relationship between leisure involvement and flow experience and focused on selected hiking trails from the National Shoushan Nature Park in Taiwan. A sampling of recreationists on site was taken using the next-to-pass method. Structural equation modeling was employed in order to construct the correlation among variables. The findings confirmed that a higher level of leisure involvement is associated with a stronger flow experience. A recreationist's stronger psychological commitment was associated with a higher flow experience, higher leisure involvement was associated with a higher level of psychological commitment, and psychological commitment was found to play a mediating role in the relationship between leisure involvement and flow experience. Based on these findings, implications are discussed and directions for future research are also highlighted.     

国内外休闲研究扫描--兼谈建立我国休闲学科体系的设想

本文全面地介绍了国内外休闲研究的发展背景、演变历程、研究现状、相关机构和代表文献，提供了一个把握休闲研究脉络和体系的图景，并就建立适合我国国情的休闲学科研究体系提出了设想。     

Prediction of leisure participation from behavioral,normative, and control beliefs: An application of the theory of planned behavior

Abstract

The theory of planned behavior (Ajzen 1985, 1987) is offered as a comprehensive framework for understanding of leisure participation. Salient behavioral, normative, and control beliefs, theoretically the basic determinants of behavior, were assessed with respect to five leisure activities: spending time at the beach, jogging or running, mountain climbing, boating, and biking. College students completed a questionnaire containing measures of these beliefs and of global expressions of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. One year later the participants reported how often they had performed each behavior in the preceding 12 months. Behavioral beliefs were found to partition into beliefs about affective reactions and beliefs about costs and benefits. Participation in leisure activities was influenced by these affective and instrumental beliefs, as well as by normative beliefs about the expectations of important others and by control beliefs about required resources and other factors that impede or facilitate leisure participation.     

Role of positive emotions in the constraint process: the case of Taiwanese college students

This study adopts the partial least squares (PLS) method to analyse the relationships among positive emotions, leisure constraints, leisure negotiation strategy, and participation frequency in outdoor recreational activities using stratified proportional sampling of Taiwanese students (N = 569) and SmartPLS 2.0 statistical software to perform statistical analyses. This study determined that positive emotions not only directly affected the level of involvement in outdoor recreational activities but also indirectly increased involvement by improving negotiation ability. While leisure constraints have a direct, positive and significant impact on the leisure negotiation strategy, they do not significantly influence the level of participation in outdoor recreational activities. This article observed that the level of participation did not depend on constraints but instead depended on the process of ‘leisure negotiation’ based on the constraints. In the future, different samples can be used to test the stability and adaptability of this model; alternatively, other variables can be added to better understand college students’ participation in outdoor recreational activities.     

Measuring the ABCs of Leisure Experience: Awareness,Boredom, Challenge,Distress

Abstract

The psychometric properties of four aspects of leisure experience (Awareness, Boredom, Challenge, Distress), originally identified and tested with adolescents, were investigated with college students. Findings indicated that the original subscales were internally consistent and could be applied, with minor modification, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, college major, or employment. Interrelationships among the four leisure constructs of Awareness, Boredom, Challenge, and Distress were found to vary as a function of both gender and ethnicity, yielding different profiles of African-American, Asian-American, European-American, and Hispanic-American male and female students.     

Pacific Area Tourism: A Guide to Key Sources of Tourism Statistics

Abstract

During the period 1988 to 1995 Korean outbound travel increased by 526% to 3,818,740 in 1995. The rapidity of this increase has caught many destinations unprepared. One such example is Australia which has only recently recognised the potential of Korean tourism. Australia's tourism industry has yet to recognise that Korean tourists have expectations that differ from those of other Asian visitors and as a result has failed to provide a product that lives up to the promotional images of Australia contained in tourism marketing campaigns. Issues such as cuisine, language difficulties and poor itineraries are identified as major problems. This article will examine the problems Australia faces in developing a range of services and products suitable for Korean tourists.     

From a Fall in the Mall to a Run in the Sun: One Journey to Ironman Triathlon

This autoethnographic account describes my personal leisure journey through an Ironman triathlon. The purpose of this paper is to highlight three themes that shed light on events like the Ironman as a leisure experience. The first theme reveals personal predispositions and the roles they play in deciding what constitutes leisure. The second theme discusses social or support networks within and around the Ironman experience. Third, the roles of key encounters are discussed as a way to make sense of what I was doing and how I was feeling. My Ironman experience represents an effort to escape the ordinary within defined, but extreme, limits. It is part of a larger search for complexity and, most of all, balance.     

Visitors to national parks: A test of the elitism argument

It frequently has been assumed that the poor and some minority groups largely lack the financial wherewithal to travel to America's national parks. Data showing an underrepresentation of the poor among visitors at some parks has spurred charges of “elitism” in national park use, and has been an often‐used argument to justify more development (especially the provision of low‐cost facilities) in the national parks. This study tested for relationships between several status characteristics and the national park visitation of residents of the Pacific Coastal Region. As hypothesized, income, education, occupation and a cumulative status measure were all positively related to the frequency of national park going. But the low magnitude of the relationships suggests that the charges of “elitism” in national park going are overdrawn, and that perhaps there has been a substantial democratization of social‐class access to a “national park experience” during this century.     

Alone with others: The paradox of privacy in wilderness

Attitudinal studies of wilderness visitors have indicated that people seek opportunities to limit interaction with other visitors so as to achieve privacy and solitude. This conventional interpretation of wilderness recreation was evaluated by comparing measures of visitor attitudes and social behavior in the backcountry of Yosemite National Park. Results show no association between visitor attitudes toward crowding and observed social interaction or behavior to avoid such social interaction. These findings suggest that subjective responses of visitors measured by questionnaires and interviews are often of debatable validity. Greater validity can be achieved by avoiding reliance on common‐sense interpretations in theory formulation and by employing multiple measurement techniques.     

A Predictive Model of Chronic Time Pressure in the Australian Population: Implications for Leisure Research

Time pressure is a perception of being rushed or pressed for time. In its most extreme form, time pressure has implications for leisure, health and wellbeing. Although previous findings from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that time pressure affects large numbers of Australians (ABS, 1998 Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1998. How Australians use their time, Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Catalogue No. 4153.0 [Google Scholar]; Bittman, 1998 Bittman, M. 1998. The land of the lost long weekend: Trends in free time among working age Australians. SPRC Discussion Paper, 83 [Google Scholar]), no research has addressed chronic time pressure (ie. always feeling time pressured). This study aims to use selected demographic variables to develop a model to predict chronic time pressure in the Australian population. The implications of chronic time pressure for leisure research are also discussed.     

Towards quality of life: the effects of the wellness tourism experience

ABSTRACT

The wellness tourism sector has experienced a significant worldwide increase. This study aimed to identify the relationships between customer experience, leisure and non-leisure satisfaction, and quality of life in wellness tourism. Specifically, customer experience was evaluated with four dimensions of the experience economy: entertainment, educational, esthetic, and escapist. The findings of this study indicate that customer experience influences leisure satisfaction, which consequently leads to non-leisure satisfaction. It was also found that both leisure and non-leisure satisfaction contribute to customer quality of life. This study provides industry practitioners with practical knowledge for promoting traveler quality of life through wellness tourism and designing effective marketing strategies to this end.     

北京地区居民旅行社产品消费特征实证研究--兼对旅行社产品设计和营销的建议

本文从消费者对产品需求的角度,以实证的方法分析了目前北京市居民旅行社产品的消费特征,并以消费者行为为依据。对旅行社的产品服务与营销提出相关建议。     

The influence of leisure and travel experiences on the school enjoyment of adolescents: a panel analysis

ABSTRACT

This research note examines the influence of experiential activities and family travel experiences on the school enjoyment of adolescents by applying a panel regression analysis. The authors used data from the Korean Children & Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS) for data analysis and performed a one-way fixed effect regression and a feasible generalized least square (FGLS) regression analyses. The findings reveal that 1) higher levels of satisfaction in experiential activities could enable adolescents to better enjoy their school lives and 2) the frequency of family and group trips had a positive impact on adolescents’ school enjoyment. However, the frequency of experiential activities was negatively associated with adolescents’ school enjoyment. This research discusses the implications with regard to the influence of leisure and family travel experiences on the school enjoyment of adolescents based on the findings.     

Dyadic Exploration of the Relationship of Leisure Satisfaction,Leisure Time,and Gender to Relationship Satisfaction

The stress suppressing model proposes that sufficient resources reduce stress. The stress exposure model suggests that certain factors expose individuals to more stress. The current study tested these two models by assessing the within-person lagging effect of leisure time on perceived severity of daily stressors. Analyzing eight-day diary data (N=2,022), we found that having more leisure time than usual on a day reduced perceived severity of daily stressors the next day and that the decrease in severity became larger with further increase in leisure time. Additionally, the effect is much stronger among busy individuals who usually had little leisure time. The findings demonstrated an accelerated suppressing effect that differed between-person, and the lagging effect affords stronger implication for causality than correlational analysis.     

Estimating the recreational value of Pakistan's largest freshwater lake to support sustainable tourism management using a travel cost model

Keenjhar Lake, Pakistan's largest freshwater lake and an important Ramsar site, provides habitat for internationally important water birds. Annually, 385,000 people visit the lake. The lake is threatened by a variety of causes, including industrial and agricultural pollution. To support its sustainable management and conservation, the lake's recreational value is estimated using an individual travel cost model. Randomly selected visitors are interviewed during peak season about their recreational travel behavior and perception of lake conditions. Key issues in travel cost modeling are addressed, including the opportunity cost of time, group travel, substitution and income effects, and endogenous stratification and truncation due to on-site sampling. Poisson and negative binomial regression models produce similar results. We find significant over-dispersion, and therefore, use the more conservative truncated negative binomial model results to estimate consumer surplus. The value of this assessment method for resource managers is illustrated by comparing the consumer surplus with existing pricing and budgeting mechanisms. The annual flow of benefits from lake recreation appears to be almost 50 times higher than the average entrance fee paid by the predominantly higher-income segments visiting the lake, suggesting scope for increasing fees and reallocating government budgets to finance the necessary lake protection measures.     

The role of perceived behavioural control in the constraint-negotiation process: the case of solo travel

This study extends the leisure constraint-effects-mitigation model to the perceived behavioural control (PBC)- constraint-negotiation model by adding PBC. Three competing models were tested to determine which model best fits the data. Results suggested that PBC mediates the relationship between motivation and negotiation, and there is a direct path from motivation to participation. Findings contribute to deepening and broadening the theory of leisure constraint negotiation because the new variable was successfully added to the original model and the model was extended to new settings (i.e. solo travel and non-Western).     

Compliance with eWOM: The influence of hotel reviews on booking intention from the perspective of consumer conformity

This study conducted two experiments to determine the influence of review valence, review quantity, and the interaction effects between the two among consumers designated as conformist and non-conformist.⁴ The results show that positive reviews are more effective than negative reviews in enhancing booking intentions and increasing the number of reviews can magnify the influence of review valence on booking intentions. Our analysis of valence indicated that reading positive reviews can have a stronger effect on booking intentions among individuals who are strongly inclined toward conformity. In addition, a greater number of reviews proved to be more persuasive among individuals displaying a low degree of conformity. Finally, the interaction effects among the three independent variables revealed that a larger number of negative reviews can be more damaging to the booking intentions of conformist individuals. In contrast, a larger number of positive reviews were shown to have a greater impact on non-conformists.     

休闲与生活质量关系的量化考察:国外研究进展及启示

参与休闲活动能够提高人们的生活质量,这是国内学界普遍认同的观点.然而这个观点更多地是从逻辑推演而来,还缺乏实证的量化考察.对休闲与生活质量关系的量化考察,涉及主客观两类指标的设置;而其最终价值在于帮助决策者制定和调整相关政策,采取有效措施,从而全面改善居民的休闲状况,提高其生活质量.