LEISURE RESEARCH IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: A LITERATURE REVIEW
LI Yao1,2, WANG Xin-xin1
1. International business administration school, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai 200433, China;
2. Business administration school, Zhongzhou University, Zhengzhou 450044, China
Abstract With the rapid development of economic, leisure is becoming more and more important. Firstly, Participating in leisure activities reasonably is not only good for physical health, but also good for improving life satisfaction and work efficiency. Secondly, as a new industry, leisure has a great impact on industry structure adjustment, employment, and economics' sustained development. Thirdly, leisure has become one of the symbols of economic development, social advancement and living standard improvement. This attracts academic scholars' attention, and related literatures emerge gradually during recent years. But it is still rare; leisure theory development lags severely. Although some scholars have already made literature review from disciplines of sociology, philosophy and economic, most of them are just about leisure's definition, leisure's scope, and leisure industry policy. In order to better understand leisure participant's behavior, this paper scans related literatures in database of EBSCO and ProQuest, and reviews them from consumer behavior perspective, which includes leisure motivation, leisure behavior and leisure satisfaction. Through literatures review, the findings are as follows. First, leisure motivations include intellectual motivation, social motivation, skill motivation, escape motivation, and so on; motivation categorization and scale development are the main trends of current leisure motivation study. Second, current leisure behavior study includes socioemotional selectivity theory, SOC theory and leisure behavior changing models. Third, leisure satisfaction includes psychological satisfaction, entrainment satisfaction, physical satisfaction, educational satisfaction, social satisfaction, esthetic satisfaction, and so on. Leisure situation and individual's demographic variables are primary factors which influence leisure satisfaction. As predictors of life satisfaction, job satisfaction and mental well-being, leisure satisfaction is widely used in sociology, human resource management and psycho diagnosis. At last, this paper also explores the future directions of Chinese leisure academic study from local scale development, leisure product research, leisure industry development, leisure service quality improvement, and so on.
2011, Vol. 26 
