Garry Chick

The Social Nature of Leisure Involvement

The involvement construct has been used to explain a variety of leisure-related phenomena. While these efforts have made valuable contributions toward furthering the fields understanding of leisure behavior and involvement in particular, many of these investigations have been limited by the measures used to operationalize the construct. Most research that has incorporated the construct in their investigations has been quantitative and has employed one of several standardized scales. Unfortunately, the performance of these scales has been inconsistent and has possibly raised more questions relating to construct validity than they have addressed. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to develop an understanding of leisure involvement from a naturalistic perspective using several ethnographic research methods. Data were collected from campers attending an agricultural fair in central Pennsylvania and was used to address the primary research question, “Why do campers annually return to participate in the Fair?” and two sub-questions, “What is the focus of their involvement?” and “How is their involvement maintained?” Results indicated that the relationships informants shared with significant family and friends was the primary source of personal relevance and was identified as the most important element of their Fair experience. Additionally, the relationships and interactions with members of their immediate social worlds shaped what they perceived to be personally relevant. These results have implications for the way in which the construct is conceptualized and measured. Specifically, greater consideration of the social component of the leisure experience is warranted.

Cultural Complexity: The Concept and Its Measurement:

Cultural complexity is one of the most commonly used variables in cross-cultural research. It has often been used as a measure of cultural evolution and has been shown to correlate with numerous other variables. At least eight measures of cultural complexity have been constructed since the late 1940s. The purpose of this article is to examine three of them, those proposed by Carneiro, Murdock and Provost, and Naroll. Particular attention will be devoted to the validity of these measures. Factor analysis and reliability analysis indicate that Murdock and Provosts index, designed for use with the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, although reliable, has two dimensions rather than one and may lack content and construct validity. A case is made for the use of the logarithm of the size of the largest settlement in a society as a measure of cultural complexity, as suggested by Naroll.

Leisure and culture: Issues for an anthropology of leisure

The coverage of and interest in non‐Western and cross‐cultural aspects of leisure seems to be on the increase in leisure studies. Although this is a welcome trend in the current climate of multiculturalism, there is currently no systematic agenda for the anthropological study of leisure. I suggest that four issues should be addressed to serve as a foundation for an anthropology of leisure. These include (a) the ethnography of leisure, (b) the cross‐cultural validity of the concept of leisure, (c) leisure and adaptation, and (d) leisure and the evolution of culture. Although my position is scientific, materialistic, and comparative, researchers who bring other perspectives can also contribute to the cross‐cultural understanding of leisure. Most important, anthropologists must come to realize that leisure is a topic worth their attention, and leisure researchers must make use of anthropological resources and not just reprise old and erroneous beliefs about leisure and culture that have become canonical in t...

Ethnicity as a Variable in Leisure Research

The purpose of this study is to examine the usefulness of ethnicity as a construct in leisure research. In particular, we are interested in the degree to which presumed ethnic groups exhibit internal cultural homogeneity. In 2002, the visitors to the Angeles National Forest (ANF) near metropolitan Los Angeles were surveyed. Using purposive sampling at sites known to be heavily used by visitors with diverse ethnic backgrounds, we obtained a sample of 444 Anglos, 312 Hispanics, and 319 Asians (overall n = 1,174). We examined whether the three nominal ethnic groups, Anglos, Hispanics, and Asians, were homogeneous in terms of cultural values as measured by Hofstedes (1980) instrument. We assume that if distinctive ethnic subcultures exist then they should be identifiable by specific measures of languages, religion, family structure, cultural values, and the like. We used cultural consensus analyses to test the homogeneity of the three ethnic groups. The results of cultural consensus analyses showed that none of the three ethnic groups and none of the subgroups we examined within the three ethnic groups were homogeneous in terms of the cultural values. Discussion of the findings and research implications are suggested.

I did not have time to play growing up... So this is my play time. It's the best thing i have ever done for myself: what is play to older women?

Little is known about play in older womens leisure lives. An examination of The Red Hat Society®, a leisure-based social group, expanded an understanding of play by including older womens viewpoints. Because of the absence of literature about emotion and friendship in both play theory and evolutionary theory, our research questions included: how do older women define play, and what are the outcomes of older womens play? Three themes about womens play emerged from data analysis (a) a context for fun, laughter, and feeling good, (b) the chance to be silly and goofy, and (c) positive public reaction to play. Results are discussed by extending current conceptualizations of play theory and evolutionary theory and the roles of play in older womens leisure lives and their health and well-being.

Leisure Constraints in Six Chinese Cities

The purpose of this study is to describe leisure constraints as perceived by residents of the Chinese cities Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Chengdu, and Shenzhen. Rather than relying on lists of leisure constraints developed in other contexts, we used the common ethnographic technique of free listing, which allows informants to indicate what they perceive as constraints on their leisure. A second sample of informants rated the importance of 37 constraints determined through the free listing procedure. Constraints in these cities can be categorized, based on their perceived importance, into eight distinct types. These relate to several demographic and sociographic variables.

An Exploration of Meanings of Leisure: A Chinese Perspective

In the West, the awareness of the important role of leisure in people’s lives has grown significantly since World War II. Leisure studies has been an academic field in the United States for the past six decades. The first undergraduate curriculum in recreation was established in the 1940s, and the first graduate program in recreation with M.S. degree was approved in 1953 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since then, the study of leisure has also developed in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and mainland China and captured the interest of scholars in various fields including sociology, anthropology, psychology, social psychology, economics, forestry and political science. The field of leisure studies has contributed to a significant growth in knowledge about leisure but the scope of this knowledge remains limited. In particular, few scholars have

Editorial: Opportunities for Cross-Cultural Comparative Research on Leisure

Cross-cultural comparative research on leisure is extremely rare in both the anthropological and leisure literatures. The opportunities for conducting such research are excellent, however. Ethnographic data archives, such as the Human Relations Area Files, are widely available and contain a trove of information on leisure in societies, both past and present, from around the world. Methods for cross-cultural comparative research have improved greatly in the past two decades. The purpose of this editorial is to urge leisure researchers to make use of both cross-cultural comparative methods and existing sources of data.

Culture as a variable in the study of leisure.

Leisure researchers increasingly have invoked culture, either implicitly or explicitly, with the claim that it accounts for differences either in leisure behavior or in attitudes, motivations, or other feelings about leisure among putatively different cultural groups. Unfortunately, they have generally been unclear on what they mean by the term “culture.” Instead, they have relied on either presumably universally understood folk definitions or on proxy measures such as nationality, language, ethnicity or race to distinguish among “cultures” and, thereby, to understand how culture allegedly affects leisure. Unfortunately, serious problems exist with this practice. The concepts of race and ethnicity, for example, are so heavily imbued with political meanings that their worth as scientific constructs is dubious at best (Brubaker, 2004; Chick et al., 2007). Moreover, whether they genuinely reflect cultural differences is an empirical issue, not one to be simply assumed. Finally, comparing leisure behavior between two or more allegedly culturally different groups is by itself not evidence that any observed variations are due to culture and not something else. Hence, I have two purposes in this research reflection. First, I urge leisure researchers to determine and then report if they are intentionally using culture as an explanatory variable in their studies and, if so, to define it. Second, I recommend a type of definition because recent advances theory and methods make the culture concept useful as an independent explanatory variable.

Working and recreating with machines: Outdoor recreation choices among machine‐tool workers in western Pennsylvania

The relationship between work and leisure has most often been described in terms of three basic models. First, the spillover model suggests that ones choice of leisure is affected by interests and attitudes developed during work. Second, the compensation model holds that leisure choices are the opposite of ones work activities, thus providing satisfaction not realized in the work context. Third, according to the segmentation model, work and leisure are distinct life domains and do not interact. Occasionally, a fourth perspective is added: Work and leisure are mutually influential. Evidence for the first three perspectives is mixed. Moreover, there is a units‐of‐analysis problem in studying work and leisure; that is, what about work and leisure is comparable? A patterned socialization model of work and leisure that encompasses and augments these perspectives is presented in this article. Evidence from the outdoor recreation activities of a sample of workers in the machining and tooling industries of west...