Abstract
Engagement in leisure activities during non-work hours has been postulated to benefit worker well-being through need fulfillment and satisfaction during leisure experiences. This study explored whether an active leisure intervention among employees improves daily leisure domain-specific need fulfillment and enjoyment, which subsequently promotes workers’ global subjective well-being. This study used an experimental daily diary approach, which randomly assigned employed participants (N = 79) to engage in either an active leisure intervention for 1 week or receive no intervention. Using multilevel path analysis, we found that participants in the active leisure intervention group experienced higher levels of life satisfaction and general positive affect after 1 week compared to those in the no intervention group, after controlling pre-intervention experiences. The active leisure intervention was effective in increasing competence and autonomy during leisure, and competence mediated the effect of active leisure intervention on life satisfaction. Through the use of a novel combination of experimental and daily diary designs, these findings offer initial evidence that an active leisure intervention might be effective in a working population.
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Notes
Retaining participants with responses to at least three daily surveys not only provided needed leisure engagement data for verifying behavioral compliance to the intervention, but also allowed us to examine within-person fluctuations in leisure domain need fulfillment and well-being (Singer and Willett 2003). Such approach has been used in previous daily diary studies (e.g., Simon et al. 2010; Trougakos et al. 2014).
Individual difference characteristics (trait self-control, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism) were used for an attrition analysis to examine the homogeneity across condition groups and across retained and drop-out samples. Individual characteristics were measured using Big Five Inventory (John and Srivastava 1999; average α = 0.87–0.93) and Trait Self-Control Scale (Tangney et al. 2004; α = 0.90) during the pre-intervention survey.
We also specified a model with only pre-intervention SWB, in order to compute R2 change due to active leisure intervention.
A separate set of supplementary analyses using a dichotomous variable indicating whether one engaged in active leisure or not on the day-level was used as a day-level proxy to the person-level intervention predictor. We found similar results as our main analyses. Detailed analyses and results were included in Appendix B in Supplementary Materials.
In Model E2 and E3, we first tested models specifying random slopes; however, variance estimates of slopes were not significant, indicating day-level effects were not varying across persons. Thus, we reported results without random slopes specified.
Given that we found non-significant evidence for the total effects of time spent in passive leisure on overall SWB on the between-person level and the potential multicollinearity issues (e.g., high correlations between general positive affect and positive activated leisure affect), we did not test indirect effects, because the testing may not provide interpretable results that corroborate the theoretical reasoning and previous empirical evidence.
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The authors would like to thank Dr. James Burton and Dr. Lauren Kuykendall for their friendly review of earlier versions of this paper, and Joel Tornquist for coding activities responses.
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Hu, X., Barber, L.K. & Santuzzi, A.M. Does Active Leisure Improve Worker Well-Being? An Experimental Daily Diary Approach. J Happiness Stud 22, 2003–2029 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00305-w
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