A Proposal of the Special Issue “A Social Psychology of Leisure 2.0”
Exclusively submitted to Journal of Leisure Research
Shintaro Kono, Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USAEiji Ito, Associate Professor, Wakayama University, Japan
Angela Loucks-Atkinson, Associate Professor, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
The purpose of this proposed special issue “A Social Psychology of Leisure 2.0” is to showcase
cutting-edge and forward-thinking exemplars of social-psychological studies of leisure, parks,
recreation, tourism, and sport, and to re-imagine the roles of this sub-discipline within the wider
leisure scholarship.
The social psychology of leisure (SPL) was a predominant research framework in the1970s and 80s, as exemplified by seminal publications by the “pioneers” of SPL, such as Seppo
E. Iso-Ahola’s (1980) The Social Psychology of Leisure and Recreation and John Neulinger’s(1981) The Psychology of Leisure. Since then, Roger C. Mannell, Douglas A. Kleiber, andGordon J. Walker, for example, have maintained SPL’s place as a distinct sub-discipline andresearch paradigm within the broader leisure literature (Kleiber, Walker, & Mannell, 2011;
Mannell & Kleiber, 1997). Besides these scholars, SPL has been enriched by numerous scholarsthat represent diverse viewpoints (e.g., women’s leisure, adolescents, youth) such as Drs. Lynn
Barnett-Morris (e.g., Barnett, 2011), Linda Caldwell (e.g., Caldwell, Darling, Payne, & Dowdy,1999), Karla Henderson (see Henderson, 2011), and Susan Shaw (e.g., Shaw, 1985). Further,scholars themselves from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds moved the field forward with theircutting-edge research on topics such as access and equity in parks and recreation, constraints andstress-coping among diverse segments of the populations (e.g., indigenous, Hispanic/Latino,African-American /Black populations (e.g., Floyd & Gramann, 1993; Gómez, 2006; Iwasaki &Mannell, 2000).
Yet, over the last couple of decades, the focus in our field may have leaned toward
critical sociology as indicated by special issues topics such as feminism (Fullagar, Rich, Pavlidis,& van Ingen, 2017; Parry & Fullagar, 2013), social justice (Mowatt & Schmalz, 2014; Steward,2014), and post-humanism (Berbary, Grimwood, & Kumm, 2017) in the Journal of LeisureResearch and Leisure Sciences. Although leisure studies, in general, has greatly benefitted fromthese critical approaches to leisure research, this shift may indicate that SPL studies have been
devalued as “uncritical” or “positivistic” and SPL practitioners have lost their voices in the field.
However, as a field, we seek “paradigm proliferation” (Parry, Johnson, & Stewart, 2013, p. 84)
and “embrace the interdisciplinary nature of leisure” (Payne, Schmalz, & Janke, 2018, p. 5). We
assert the field of leisure studies can survive and flourish when multiple theoretical anddisciplinary perspectives co-exist alongside one another. To that end, we believe this special
issue is timely to highlight and reinvent SPL. Hence the title of this special issue is A Social
Psychology of Leisure 2.0.
In contrast, SPL has expanded to researchers outside of North America and leisurestudies. For example, Mannell and Kleiber’s (1997) A Social Psychology of Leisure wastranslated into Japanese (Hayami, 2004) while its second edition by Kleiber et al. (2011) was1

translated into Mandarin (Chen, 2014). Numerous studies grounded in SPL have been presented
at international and non-Western leisure conferences such as World Leisure Congress, ResearchCommittee 13 Sociology of Leisure in the International Sociological Association, and theJapanese Society of Lifelong Sports. Scholars in psychology and the sub-discipline of positivepsychology have become increasingly interested in SPL (e.g., de Bloom, Rantanen, Tement, &Kinnunen, 2018; Freire, 2013; Kuykendall, Tay, & Ng, 2015; Newman, Tay, & Diener, 2014).
The recent special issue in The Journal of Positive Psychology devoted to leisure (Schmalz &Pury, 2018) attracted much interdisciplinary work from leisure studies, psychology, humandevelopment and family studies, and agriculture. As these are exciting cases of SPL adoption,
they may also pose issues. For example, some international scholars may find that SPL theories,
methods, and even languages used in the West do not readily translate into their unique culturalcontexts (see Ito & Walker, 2014). Positive psychologists of leisure may not be fully aware of
the rich history of SPL (e.g., Iso-Ahola, 1980; Kleiber et al., 2011; Neulinger, 1981). Therefore,
we need the space to share culturally diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives on SPL, giventhat an intersection of cultural and positive psychological perspectives has also emerged in SPL
research (e.g., ikigai as an eudaimonic aspect of well-being in Japan; Kono, Walker, Ito, & Hagi,
in press). This proposed special issue offers the space to showcase cutting-edge and forwardthinking exemplars of socio-psychological studies of leisure, parks, recreation, tourism, andsport, and to re-imagine the roles of this sub-discipline within the wider leisure scholarship. Ouremphasis on international and interdisciplinary aspects of leisure is in harmony with the new
directions of the Journal of Leisure Research 2.0 (Payne et al., 2018).
Pursuant to the above background and justification, this special issue calls for various
forms of papers—empirical, theoretical, methodological, conceptual (e.g., potential new models)
and review-based—on topics including but not limited to the following:- New and revised theories of SPL- Innovative interdisciplinary SPL research where SPL is integrated with, for example,
physiology, geography, economics, and/or anthropology- Systematic, or comprehensive, literature review on key topics within SPL- Meta-analyses on key topics within SPL- Critical commentary on SPL’s relevance to the wider field of leisure, parks, recreation,tourism, and sports studies- Philosophical foundations and paradigms for SPL research- Causality and rigorous research design (e.g., longitudinal and experimental design) forSPL- Unique data collection methods (e.g., technology-assisted methods such as smartphone,visual data, BIG data) for SPL- Advanced statistics (e.g., Bayesian, multi-level modeling, rigorous structural equation
modeling practice) for SPL- Qualitative methods and mixed methods for SPL- Non-Western and cross-cultural studies of SPL- SPL in diverse contexts (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, social class, disability, sexuality,age, religion)2

-Critical reviews or empirical studies relating to environmental or political relationship ofSPL for applied work in recreation and leisure studies, and related disciplines.

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Timeline
Date
March 10, 2019

Document needed
Deadline for 500-word abstracts

Editorial tasks
Shin, Eiji, and Angela will review
abstracts. They will need otherreviewers if some abstracts are out of
their expertise or written bythemselves.

Mid-April

Decisions for full-paper
invitations will be sent out

Shin will send out these decisions. As
we aim for 6-7 papers, we will invite
11-12 papers, assuming that some will
not follow through or will be rejected(or don’t make it to the production
deadlines).

October 31

Deadline for the full-paper
submission.

Shin, Eiji, and Angela will lead thedouble-blind peer review process. They
will first go through papers to decide
whether they are review-worthy. Then,
have an AE for each paper, and each
AE will assign at least 2 reviewers.

Mid-January,
2020

Decisions based on the 1st roundof review

Shin, Eiji, and Angela will makedecisions based on reviewers’ andAEs’ recommendations. Send them out
to the authors.
At this point, Shin, Eiji, and Angela
should have a fairly good idea of which
papers will be in the final issue. They
will start drafting up an introduction
paper.
The papers will be reassigned to thesame AEs and reviewers (if available).

Early March

Deadline for revisions

Early AprilDecisions based on the 2nd roundof review

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For the papers to be accepted, they will
be passed to the production. For papers
that require “a little more work,” they
will be returned for another round ofreview. At this point, we might have tomake a decision that some good papers
which needs more polishing will haveto be dropped from the special issue toa normal issue. The same goes if wehave too many good papers (more than7).
Early May

Deadline for the 2nd revisions

The papers will be reassigned to thesame AEs and reviewers (if available).

Early June

Decisions based on the 3rd roundof review

Hopefully by this time, all papers areeither accepted or rejected. Others
should be moved to a normal issue, if
the AE and reviewers believe they havestrong potentials.
Shin, Eiji, and Angela will finish theirintroduction paper, includingreferences to the papers to be includedin the special issue.

Early July, 2020

The special issue is ready to go.

5References
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