How We Choose To Spend Our Free Time: A Framework For Understanding Leisure Behaviour
As physical educators, we aim to empower our students to live healthy, active lives by filling their days with adventure and play.
Leisure time—the time when we are free of obligations, work, eating, and sleeping—is typically when normal humans tend to fit physical activity into our lives.
But how do we decide what to do during that time? What does the internal decision-making process look like?
Dr. Brenda Robertson, a professor emeritus at Acadia University, asked herself the same question as she had developed her leisure behaviour model.
Let’s take a look at how her model works:
✅ Step One: Needs
It all starts when a need arises, be it conscious or unconscious. Some itch that needs to be scratched pushes us to want to take action. This can be anything from a need to move and play, to escape, to connect with nature, to compete, or more.
🔠 Step Two: Activity Repertoire
Once we feel that need, we then turn to our activity repertoire. This is an internal bank of activities that we know can help us satisfy our needs. Each person’s activity repertoire is unique to that person, and the list of activities that they include in their repertoire is influenced by that person’s values, attitudes, interests, knowledge, skills, and experience.
⛔️ Step Three: Intervening Factors
Once we’ve selected our activity, we need to navigate a series of intervening constraints. These can be internal (e.g. self-esteem, belonging, perceived challenge) or external (e.g. financial costs, weather, time).
⚡️ Step Four: Action, Inaction, & Anti-Social Behaviour
Several outcomes can occur depending on our resilience in the face of the intervening constraints and the quality of our activity repertoire regarding appropriate activities to satisfy our needs.
First off, we can take action and engage in leisure behaviour. This is when our plan goes through as intended, which can lead to our needs being satisfied (although that isn’t guaranteed).
Second, the intervening factors may prove too much, and we may fail to act. In this case, our needs go unsatisfied.
Third, we may not have enough activities in our repertoire, or we may crumble in the face of the constraints… and yet we remain motivated to act. In these situations, individuals might seek out inappropriate, unhealthy, or antisocial behaviours. After all, boredom and frustration are never a good mix.
How Physical Education Teachers Can Benefit From This Model
Understanding this model and its steps benefits one's leisure literacy (i.e. the knowledge, skills and confidence to engage in personally meaningful, health-enhancing leisure.)
As physical educators, we can use our understanding of this model to help our students develop their leisure literacy:
🧠 Helping Students Develop Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a pillar of social and emotional learning, and it is key to recognizing and making sense of the needs that arise within us.
Helping our students develop their self-awareness skills can empower them to recognize needs as they appear.
📈 Helping Students Expand Their Activity Repertoire
When students do not have enough appropriate activities to choose from, this can lead to inaction or anti-social behaviour.
By helping our students expand their activity repertoire and reflect on the meaningfulness of the activities within it, we help put them in the best possible position to satisfy their needs through healthy- meaningful leisure behaviour.
🧭 Helping Students Develop Resilience
Helping our students develop resilience (i.e. supporting the development of protective factors that outweigh the risk factors in their lives) can help them stay strong in the face of any intervening factors that might get in the way of their leisure behaviour.
Again, self-awareness is key here. That said, teaching students strategies for overcoming external barriers can also help them move forward with momentum, even when external factors want to slow them down.
By understanding the decision-making process behind leisure behaviour, physical educators can design specific learning experiences that will empower their students to engage in health-enhancing, personally relevant leisure activities throughout their lives.