Validation of a task attributes description of leisure

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Abstract
A central problem in the area of leisure research is the measurement and description of this diverse sphere of activity. One solution to the problem is to profile people's leisure pattern in terms of a number of psychologically significant, task based attributes derived from an analysis of people's leisure activities. The present study sought to provide some evidence for the validity of this task based approach. The leisure patterns of 132 first year university students were described along five task dimensions ‐ influence, variety, pressure, skill utilization and interaction. It was hypothesized that these leisure attributes would be significantly and differentially correlated with a number of personality measures including extroversion, affiliation, dominance, need for control, achievement, harm avoidance, endurance, locus of control, cognitive structure and change. These hypotheses were substantially supported. Both frequency and importance of participation information did not, in most cases, increase the size of the correlation between personality and leisure attributes. Personality and leisure attributes were slightly correlated also with leisure satisfaction. It was concluded that a task based description of leisure allows the identification of some significant variations in leisure patterns.

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