Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2013

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory study was to apply the concept of serious leisure to gain an under-standing of how amateur athletes in a community setting integrate their free-time interests with life-style. A secondary purpose was to investigate which characteristics of serious leisure may identify the participants’ levels of dedication to participation in an adult sport program. The study was con-ducted in the south-central region of the United States in a rural city. A total of 252 pen-and-paper based surveys were collected from softball and volleyball players who enrolled in the community sport program in the fall of 2010. The results indicated that all six serious leisure characteristics (perseverance, personal effort, career progress, career contingencies, strong identification, and unique ethos) were able to distinguish the rural amateur athletes’ level of sport lifestyle, while strong identification and unique ethos were the two serious leisure characteristics that generated the greatest differences between the two levels of sport lifestyle of amateur athletes.

Publication Title

LARNet: The Cyber Journal of Applied Leisure and Recreation Research

Volume

16

Issue

3

First Page

13

Last Page

22

Rights

In Copyright. Copyright owner has not been determined. This item has been posted for educational and non-commercial use only.

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