SHINTARO KONO'S LEISURE RESEARCH LAB

Exploring one of the most understudied aspects of our life

My research aims to understand how people experience leisure, and more importantly why they live a leisure life that they have. This involves studying what constrains or motivates people's leisure experience, and what outcomes people derive from their leisure. I am also interested in how different and similar people's leisure experience is across different cultures.

SHINTARO'S BIO

Who I Am

I’m an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. I am passionate about studying and teaching leisure. Research suggests that leisure is the life domain that can make our lives worth living. Yet, many of us do not know how to make most out of it. And that's the knowledge that I would like to produce and teach.

I am originally from Japan. My leisure interests involve both active (e.g., badminton, golf) and cultural (e.g., trying new food, gaming) activities.

RESEARCH

ONLINE LEISURE EDUCATION INTERVENTIONS (ONLEI)

Leisure education has been traditionally an intervention tool for people with disabilities. However, the conventional in-person delivery costs many resources. Can we do it online -- through videos, apps, website, messengers, etc.? This project is inspired by online positive psychological interventions. One of the main outcomes I examine is subjective well-being. This is a new research -- join me!

ONLINE LEISURE EDUCATION INTERVENTIONS (ONLEI)

LEISURE AND IKIGAI, OR LIFE WORTH LIVING

This was my doctoral research conducted at the University of Alberta. I developed a theory of the relationships between leisure and ikigai (i.e., life worth living in Japanese), using the mixed methods research design. The first qualitative study guided by grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) created a substantive theory on the topic based on photo elicitation data from Japanese university students. The second quantitative study tested this theory, using partial least squares structural equation modeling (Hair et al., 2017), with online survey data collected from a larger sample of Japanese university students.

LEISURE AND IKIGAI, OR LIFE WORTH LIVING

LEISURE-TIME PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND CONSTRAINTS/CONSTRAINT NEGOTIATION

This cross-cultural research project was led by my collaborator Dr. Eiji Ito (Wakayama University, Japan). We conducted free-descriptive online surveys with Japanese and Euro-Canadian adults to learn about what constrained their LTPA participation and how they negotiated such constraints. Based on this information we developed new typologies of constraints and negotiation as well as new survey items. We used these items in the follow-up cross-cultural survey to examine their validity. My contributions have been methodological.

LEISURE-TIME PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND CONSTRAINTS

LEISURE AFTER NATURAL DISASTERS

This was my Master's research conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After seeing the devastation caused by the 3.11 tsunami and earthquake in Japan, I worked to understand how leisure experiences after the disasters helped survivors recover psychologically. This qualitative study was based on semi-structured interviews with survivors and disaster volunteers as well as my field observations.

LEISURE AFTER NATURAL DISASTERS