The Serious Leisure Perspective: An Introduction for Therapeutic Recreation.

The serious leisure perspective offers a panoramic view of the many different kinds of free-time activities found in modern society, describes their origin and appeal, and explains the different rewards gained by pursuing them. The Perspective also shows how these activities fit in the local community and wider society. Broadly classified as serious, casual, and project-based leisure, they offer different solutions to three key problems in therapeutic recreation (TR). They are (1) to know which kind of leisure to recommend or suggest to people with a particular disability; (2) to come to grips with the still dominant public view that real personal worth is measured according to the work people do; (3) to help offset among the large majority of practitioners the lack of a theory of leisure. The problems are considered first and then the serious leisure perspective is applied as a solution to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]