Toward an applied social psychology of leisure

Abstract

Social experience has not figured prominently in the social psychology of leisure in the past, though the qualities of leisure experience itself—feelings of freedom, intrinsic interest, self-determination, and enjoyment—have had a defining and guiding role. The experience design movement has revitalized prospects for leisure service management based to some extent on this earlier work; but both experience design and basic social psychological research into the dynamics and effects of leisure experience might well give more attention to the nature of self in social contexts, the dynamics of social engagement including “shared flow,” and the integrative and disintegrative effects of enjoyable social interaction. Experience design can indeed protect personal autonomy and concern itself with “downstream effects,” but investigators would be wise to consider both personal development and social integration in the process, preferably with participatory action research that monitors social experience.

Keywords:

• Application
• experience
• engagement
• social integration

Notes

1 For a more on this response and others to the critiques of the Experience Design movement see also Pine and Gilmore (2011).

2 This solution to the current COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on leisure is the subject of a recent special issue of Leisure Sciences (2020, 42, July).