Flow and leisure

Abstract

Leisure has eluded definition by social scientists despite decades of theory, research, and applied work on the topic. According to one analysis (Primeau LA, Am J Occup Ther 50:569-577, 1996), there are three prominent ways of defining leisure; as: (a) the residual time available outside of productive and maintenance activity (sometimes simply described as non-work time); (b) the set of activities that people identify as leisure pursuits in a culture, and (c) a positive experiential state whose essence is the experience of being freely chosen and intrinsically rewarding. Each definition has limitations and the lack of consensus has been a challenge for the field of leisure science. However we choose to define and delimit the phenomenon of leisure, we probably can agree that we think of the paradigmatic leisure experience as a positive one. Of course, all periods of discretionary time and all normatively defined leisure activities are not positive experientially.