The Effect of the Experience Use History on the Multidimensional Structure of Motivations to Participate in Leisure Activities

AbstractThe purpose of this paper was to determine the extent to which experience level affects the factor structure of motivations to participate in leisure activities. Data were part of the National River Recreation Study database which included 3181 river floaters from 13 river settings. Factor analyses of responses to a 36-item set of Recreation Experience Preference (REP) scales were performed separately for each of six categories of Experience Use History (EUH). Because of the complexity of the results, factor solutions were compared across only three of the most distinct EUH groups in terms of (a) overall similarity of the factor structures, (b) similarity between individual pairs of factors, and (c) structural characteristics of each factor solution. The results indicate that the motivational structure of adjacent EUH categories (ordered in terms of increasing experience) are more similar than the structures of nonadjacent categories. In addition, analysis of the individual factors indicate that the factor structures become increasingly complex with higher levels of experience. These results suggest that the structure of leisure motivations may not generalize across individuals. Further, such structural variations may lend insights into the dynamic nature of the psychological meaning of leisure.KEY WORDS: MotivationMeasurementFactor structureExperience use history