Constraints on leisure activities participation among Chinese immigrants in Canada / by Feihuang Xiong.

Abstract

Although leisure constraint studies and issues of leisure behaviour among racial minorities have been well documented over the past twenty years, very little systematic effort has been devoted to explore immigrants' perceptions of constraints on leisure. This study attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the largest immigrant group in Canada, Chinese immigrants, to examine the constraints associated with three types of leisure participation decisions, including constraints that caused people to reduce or cease leisure participation, constraints that intervened in people's desire to take part in new leisure activities, and constraints that hindered people from starting new leisure activities they desired to do. Questionnaires were completed by 133 Chinese immigrants from Toronto and Thunder bay, Ontario, Canada. Results reveal that for the past two years, 29 percent of respondents were quitters who had reduced at least one of their leisure participation and had not started participating in any new leisure activities, 20 percent were replacers who replaced leisure activities they had quitted with new ones, another 20 percent were adders who had not quit any of their old leisure activities but had added at least one new leisure activity, and 30 percent were continuers who neither had stopped nor had started participating any leisure activities. And outdoor recreational activities were the most often started activities, exercise-orientated activities were both the most often ceased and desired to take up activities. As well, typical Chinese activities were also the most often ceased leisure activities. Four dimensions of leisure constraints (social-cultural constraints, personal constraints, access constraints, and time constraint) emerged from a factor analysis. The two most important constraint dimensions for Chinese immigrants were time constraint and access constraints. The intensity of personal constraints differed depending on the types of constrained leisure. Comparably, for those who desired to start new leisure activities, personal constraints were not important at all. However personal constraints still had impacts for those who did not desire to take up new leisure activities. Results also indicate that, for those who have reduced/ ceased leisure activity participation, there were no significant differences between highly acculturated respondents’ and lowly acculturated respondents’ perceptions o f leisure constraints. However, for both the decision of not desiring new leisure activities and the decision of desired to start new leisure activities, the higher the acculturation level respondents hold the lower the level of importance for the social-cultural constraints. Moreover, among various socio-demographic variables, education, financial status, age, length of residence and gender somewhat differentiated immigrants’ perception of leisure constraints according to different leisure participation decisions.