Cultural Consonance Mediates the Effects of Leisure Constraints on Leisure Satisfaction: A Reconceptualization and Replication

Abstract

Satisfaction with leisure contributes to life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, health, and overall wellbeing. It is not clear, however, how individuals develop expectations for satisfaction with their leisure experiences. In this study, we propose a cultural basis for leisure expectations. In particular, we model cultural consonance in leisure, the degree to which individuals, in their own behavior, match cultural conventions for appropriate or favored leisure, as a mediator between leisure constraints and leisure satisfaction based on data from urban, suburban, and rural Taiwan. We then apply the same model to data previously gathered in Mainland China and Taiwan. Results indicate that the new model fits all three data sets well and that, under most conditions, cultural consonance mediates the relationship between leisure constraints and leisure satisfaction.

Keywords:

• leisure satisfaction
• leisure constraints
• cultural consonance in leisure
• mediation
• Mainland China
• Taiwan

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Following Dressler (2017), we use the term “cultural model” to refer to the schematic or modular knowledge contained in cultural domains, such as “birds,” “household appliances,” or “leisure activities.” Cultural models consist of the elements in the domains, relationships among those elements, and information about how domains relate to each other.

2 “Leisure life” is a concept in Chinese that corresponds well with what can be translated to English as “leisure lifestyle.” Bourdieu (1984) described lifestyle as the material accouterments and behavioral indicators that reflect being a success in life. We adopt his definition specifically with reference to the behavioral subdomain of leisure.

3 Factor scores are usually preferred since they are weighted by each informant’s level of competence. In practice, however, summed measures and factor scores typically correlate nearly perfectly.

4 Comrey and Lee (1992) regarded loadings of .70 and above as excellent, .63–.69 as very good, .55–.62 as good, .45–.54 as fair, and below .45 as poor. In those cases where fewer than three indicators loaded at .70 or greater, we retained the item with the next highest loading.

5 We chose three groups to minimize the number of analyses. The technique works well with as few as two groups or as many as five (we did not examine more than five).

6 The New Taiwan dollar is the official currency of Taiwan (1 TWD =0.0345 U.S. dollar at the time of the study).

7 We will not present SEM diagrams for the Mainland China and Taiwan I analyses as they are the same as Figure 2 except that the coefficients differ and the diagram for Mainland China includes four leisure constraint factors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for the financial support for this research under contracts NSC96-2415-H-259-002-SS3 and NSC99-2410-H-259-060. We also thank the World Leisure Organization for their support of the research in Mainland China.