| Abstract: | A major goal of recreation and leisure services is to contribute to an individual's satisfaction and pursuit of happiness. The study of the various dimensions of leisure satisfaction deserves additional consideration not only for the sake of advancing the frontiers of knowledge but for practical reasons as well. This study examined the overall satisfaction of a Fort Hood Morale Welfare and Recreation leisure activity package as a function of the participants' attitudes, participation rates, socio-economic characteristics and optimistic (or pessimistic) beliefs. Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) was employed to discover which characteristics were most important in distinguishing members of one group from another. In order to employ discriminant analysis, comparison groups were designated based upon the respondents' attitudes towards 16 leisure activities. Based upon recent research, certain relevant socio-demographic discriminant variables were chosen to be included with optimistic/pessimistic beliefs and participation rates in the discriminant analysis. By differentiating individuals into groups with the most similar characteristics, the statistical analyses suggest that overall optimistic or pessimistic beliefs were statistically significant in several cases but did not prove to have any practical utility. The analyses of the study data also suggested that the relative importance of a leisure activity is a statistically significant discriminant measure. In addition, when relative importance is combined with stated measures of leisure satisfaction, it showed some practical utility as a discriminant measure for leisure activities. This study provided an alternate perspective for studying the attitudes and behaviors of the Fort Hood population and their complicated relationships with a package of leisure activities. First, the measurement of leisure attitudes appear to be too complex to be defined accurately in one dimension (one place and time). Second, although the relative importance of one leisure activity over another proved to be a good discriminator between the user and non-user of a "formalized" leisure activity, it does not begin to define what other, (less well defined), leisure activities may be competing for the individual's resources. Last of all, this study underlined the need for the development of a satisfaction model that will allow the comparison of individual attitude profiles to larger, regional or national profiles of leisure activity use. |
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