Recent studies about boredom during free time.

Despite our best professional efforts at providing services, places and educational programs designed to help people use their free time meaningfully, we are still confronted with the pervasive problem of boredom. We know that when faced with a period of free time, some individuals just cannot seem to identify a leisure activity that is interesting, challenging, or exciting. These people would be likely to describe their free time as boring.

It is puzzling that anyone would feel bored during free time. All of our theories of the "state of mind" perspective of leisure assume that people seek out leisure activities that make them feel self-determining, competent and optimally involved. Boredom, if it occurs at all, should be a brief motivational state that tells us we need to find something interesting to do. Moreover, the common definition of leisure time as the hours of the day during which we are relatively free from constraint makes leisure boredom even more confusing. Being bored at work, or school, or in other environments in which our choices are limited makes sense. But boredom when we are free to choose what to do? Why?

This question has caught the imagination of several researchers, including Seppo Iso-Ahola, Linda Caldwell, Youngkill Lee, Mounir Ragheb and myself. A number of recent studies provide an initial glimpse into why people get bored in their free time. For example, Seppo Iso-Ahola and I published a paper in 1987 in which we studied 134 adults from the general population of a large East Coast city. We found that a lot of things didn't seem to make a difference in whether people get bored in free time. Age, income, race, education, employment status and gender were all poor predictors of a person's boredom. The degree to which someone had a strong "work ethic" or "leisure ethic" made little difference, as did common constraints (not enough time, lack of transportation, no one to do things with, and so forth). What did seem to influence whether people got bored or not? The answer was: the degree to which people were aware that leisure activities could meet their psychological needs. (The questionnaire item we used said "I've never really given much thought to whether leisure could be psychologically rewarding.")

Best Predictor

This is a little confusing, so let's examine the idea further. Our data suggested that a person's answer to this single item was the best predictor of how bored they were in free time. People who were more aware of the potential for leisure activities to add meaningfully to their lives were less likely to get bored, and people who lacked this awareness were more likely to get bored.

This fits nicely with intrinsic motivation theory. Deci and Ryan, in their 1985 book, state that in order to become intrinsically motivated, individuals must be aware that their need for intrinsic rewards (like feelings of self-determination and competence) can be satisfied. Viewed from this perspective, our findings suggest that people who were aware that their intrinsic needs could be met in their leisure activities were less likely to be bored. Linda Caldwell, Deb Bandalos and I got similar results in a group of 474 college students, and Linda and I found essentially the same thing in a sample of 155 adults with permanent spinal cord injuries (Weissinger, Caldwell and Bandalos, 1992; Caldwell and Weissinger, in press).

Boredom during free time, it seems, may be a result of our ignorance about the potential for our leisure choices to importantly enhance our lives. This sounds simple, but the implications for leisure education are profound. It is possible that one of the most effective things we could do to reduce boredom is to help people understand that the things they choose to do in their free time can add meaning and richness to their lives.

Consider the fact that the U.S. public school system has made concerted efforts in the last three decades to provide career counseling to all students. These interventions are designed to help young people make wise choices about the eight hours a day they will spend at work. Career counselors have at their disposal a wide array of interest batteries, personality tests and intervention techniques that allow them to increase students awareness of the need to make career choices that will enhance their lives.

Yet no similar effort is made to increase the awareness of young people about the use of free time. In fact, most of us have never been overtly informed that the things we do in our free time can not only make us happier and healthier, but also wiser, less isolated, and more tolerant. Leisure education is not as simple as teaching people skills, or even informing them about opportunities. Leisure education means telling people what the recreation profession has long known: that for many people, leisure choices provide a primary opportunity to be fully functioning human beings.

Why should we bother to use leisure education to reduce the likelihood of boredom in flee time? The most important reason that has emerged from recent research studies is that leisure boredom is consistently associated with other negative behaviors and outcomes. For example, in 1991 Seppo Iso-Ahola and Edward Crowley reported that adolescents diagnosed as substance abusers were more bored with their free time than adolescents who were not substance abusers. This was true even after the researchers controlled for other variables like gender, age, race, socioeconomic status and family structure.

Sensation Seekers

Their explanation for this finding was that substance abusers are also "sensation seekers" who want high levels of activity and excitement during free time. When leisure activities don't meet their needs, they get bored, and abuse drugs and alcohol as a means of reducing boredom. Youngkill Lee (1990) arrived at the same conclusion concerning adolescents in Korea.

In a 1989 article, Edward Smith and Linda Caldwell compared adolescent smokers and nonsmokers in a sample of 1407 Canadian 10th graders. They found that adolescents who smoked reported more boredom during their most frequent leisure activity than adolescents who did not smoke. The researchers concluded that adolescent smokers in their sample spent considerable free time in activities that were conducive to boredom and unhealthy behaviors.

These studies associating leisure boredom and unhealthy choices are also confirmed by a study Linda Caldwell, Ed Smith and I reported at the 1993 SPRE Leisure Research Symposium. In a sample of 447 college undergraduates, we found that people with more boredom during free time rated themselves as less mentally and physically healthy than people with less boredom. This was true for both men and women. In another study from the 1993 symposium, Mounir Ragheb reported that among a sample of 343 college students, people who were more lonely were also more bored during free time. This is consistent with findings from James Oppenheim's 1984 study which showed that college students who were less socially competent were more bored with their leisure.

None of these studies can definitively state that boredom in free time causes substance abuse, smoking, poor health, or loneliness. Nor is there a very complete understanding of the factors that cause boredom. But the accumulation of evidence leads to the initial conclusion that boredom during free time is consistently related to negative behaviors and outcomes, and that it occurs, at least in part, because people are not aware of the potential inherent in meaningful leisure activities.

The challenge to leisure service professionals is to address this issue at both the individual and societal levels. Educational efforts focused on preventing boredom will have to take into account that bored individuals are the product of widespread failure to prepare us to use free time meaningfully.

Beyond Traditional Delivery

One irony faced by professionals is that organized recreation serves a relatively small portion of the public; most people engage in "self-programmed" leisure activities. Even more perplexing is the notion that people who find leisure time boring are probably least likely to seek out organized recreation. So how can we reach these people? Although public and private recreation agencies can apply research about boredom to alter their programs and philosophies, the broader answer will require going beyond traditional service delivery.

For example, schools are an obvious setting for capturing the attention of young people. I have often wondered why parks and recreation agencies have not established better relationships with educators and created more effective educational programs in schools. Why wouldn't recreation professionals volunteer to speak to students, not just about things like signing up for athletic leagues, but about the nature of free time and its productive uses? Why couldn't we use recreation professionals as leisure consultants in the schools? For that matter, why have we underutilized schools as undergraduate and graduate pracficum sites? And why is it that leisure studies professors haven't set up a dialogue with the faculty who train teachers and school counselors? This last point is even more puzzling since many recreation curricula are housed in colleges of education.

Different Problems

Reaching adults who are beyond their formal schooling presents different problems. Again, it is difficult to understand why we have failed to consciously utilize the news media for leisure education purposes. Newspaper public interest stories, local talk shows and local access cable stations are all obvious choices for planting stories that address the meaningful use of leisure time. Local and state public broadcasting and community radio stations typically produce and distribute high quality programming on an incredibly diverse array of topics. I suspect that utilizing these media sources simply requires an informed professional with a willingness to be persuasive and persistent.

The question of how to address boredom in the general population has no single, or simple, answer. But given the present state of relative inaction, there seems to be no where to go but up. Perhaps the more difficult question is, "Why have we done so little to educate for leisure?" At a presentation in San Jose, Mark Searle of the University of Manitoba said jokingly that he was waiting to see a study that didn't have implications for leisure education. We certainly have no shortage of ideas. What we seem to lack are models for effectively implementing them.

References

Caldwell, L.L., & Weissinger, E. (in press). Factors influencing free time boredom in a sample of persons with spinal cord injuries. Therapeutic Recreation Journal

Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.

Iso-Ahola, S.E., & CrowIey, E.D. (1991). Adolescent substance abuse and leisure boredom. Journal of Leisure Research, 23, 260-271.

Iso-Ahola, S.E., & Weissinger, E. (1987). Leisure and boredom. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 5, 356-364.

Lee, Y. (1990). Leisure boredom: Possible cause of adolescent drug abuse. Korean Journal of Leisure and Recreation, 7, 76-90.

Oppenheim, J.S. (1984). Perceived social competence, boredom and capacity for self-entertainment. Unpublished Masters thesis, University of Maryland, College Park.

Ragheb, M.G. (1993, October). A multiple regression analysis of the contribution of campus recreation, leisure satisfaction, loneliness and a set of satisfactions to students. Paper presented at the SPRE Leisure Research Symposium, San Jose, CA.

Smith, E.A., & Caldwell, L.L. (1989). The perceived quality of leisure experiences among smoking and nonsmoking adolescents. Journal of Early Adolescence, 9, 153-162.

Weissinger, E., Caldwell, L.L., & Smith, E.A. (1993, October). Effects of differing levels of leisure boredom on self-reports of mental and physical health among traditionally aged college students. Paper presented at the SPRE Leisure Research Symposium, San Jose, CA.

Weissinger, E., Caldwell, L.L., & Bandalos, D,L (1992). Relation between intrinsic motivation and boredom in leisure time. Leisure Sciences, 14, 317-325.

Ellen Weissinger is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.