The identification and measurement of psychological aspects of leisure

This paper addresses the problem of the place of psychological measurement in leisure sciences by dwelling upon two aspects of that problem. The first is the question of what the purpose is of measurement in the leisure sciences. The second concerns the identity of the underlying concept, ‘leisure’. In the first section, a short overview will be presented of several available approaches to the measurement of psychological aspects of leisure. The next two sections will take up the problem of the identity of leisure from the viewpoint of people engaged in leisure activities and relate it to how psychological aspects of leisure have been measured. It will be argued that it is only useful and meaningful to develop measurement instruments for several psychological aspects of leisure experiences if one first takes into account an analysis of how people identify leisure.