| Sumario: | While there has been a growth in leisure coping research the debate as to how leisure functions as a coping strategy and is distinguishable from more general coping strategies, that is, strategies not directly associated with leisure, continues. How leisure functions as a coping strategy and its role as a therapeutic technique with important implications for counselling is the focus of this symposium. What is clear from this symposium is that there is an increasing awareness of the importance of leisure as a coping and therapeutic tool with a growing body of research directly addressing the way and under what conditions leisure can contribute to health, well-being and work–life balance.The association between leisure and health is one that has been alluded to for some time. The theme that emerges from much of this literature is that leisure has the potential to reduce stress. The evidence to support this theme stems from a growing body of research that now points to the importance of leisure as a means of helping people cope with stress. This research has strong parallels with the psychological literature, particularly the notion that if coping strategies are classified as problem or emotion focused then leisure may operate as a form of emotion focused coping where the motives for engaging in leisure activities have stress reducing properties.Set against this context Linda Caldwell addresses the issue of under what conditions and why leisure can be therapeutic and contribute to health and well-being. The leisure-health literature can, Caldwell argues, be generally organised around three classes of research. The first involves exploring how leisure activity serves as a preventive mechanism helping to ward off poor health and risk behaviours before they occur. The second and primarily the main focus of much leisure research is concerned with the use of leisure in the stress-coping process. The third and relatively new direction for leisure research explores the way leisure may operate as a means to transcend negative life events. The conclusion is that leisure can contribute to physical, social, emotional and cognitive health through prevention, coping and transcendence. Caldwell then addresses the question of why leisure may be therapeutic. The studies reviewed suggest that there are common protective factors that are unique to leisure that provide its therapeutic qualities. These include, for example, the meaningfulness of leisure activities, the competency and self-efficacy derived from leisure participation and being self-determined and in control. Finally Caldwell draws attention to the need for researchers and practitioners to provide guidance, education and counselling to help people reap these benefits.The two papers that follow take up this challenge and draw attention to the issues surrounding leisure counselling. The first, by Dean Juniper, begins by defining leisure counselling as the systematic exploitation of a person's past, existing or prospective hobbies, activities and interests for broad psychotherapeutic purposes. Leisure counselling, as Juniper makes clear, functions as a powerful agent in the invigoration of a range of existing but inadequate coping skills, and can also act in an innovatory style when such key skills are absent. The main contribution of this paper lies in what Juniper describes as ‘a methodology of application’ for leisure counselling. Juniper presents a triad of techniques open to the leisure counsellor—distraction, anticipation and confrontation—and goes on to illustrate how each may be applied.Juniper also believes that leisure counselling requires a new mode of thinking. So to sharpen awareness this paper outlines how leisure counselling can be applied across a wide span of coping needs. Three broad domains are covered. First, there is the need to ease phobias, panics, stress and tension states, and the aftermath of traumatic episodes. Next, for the feelings domain, there is the requirement to create and sustain positive moods, and on occasion to siphon-off abnormal excitement. Then there is the need to contain and limit the destructive demands of habits and impulses, and also address the very sharp therapeutic challenge of obsessions and compulsions.Finally, Juniper makes the point that although this paper has emphasised leisure counselling's individual applications in an effort to provide a detailed coverage of actual and potential techniques in reality, leisure counselling reaches beyond the individual to influence social policy, and address community problems, both psychological and physical. Simply by drawing attention to three varied social concerns, the problem of personal isolation, the decline in physical exercise activity, and the costly and irritating nuisance of graffiti, Juniper concludes that by identifying feasible leisure counselling approaches, this should serve to open up another dimension to leisure counselling.The significance of leisure counselling and its role in health and well-being is also the theme of the paper written by Michael Leitner and Sara Leitner. These authors begin by making the point that if leisure is defined as free or unobligated time, then leisure is clearly the category of time expenditure that has the greatest potential for making people healthy. Therefore, they argue educating and counselling people on how to make best use of their free time can have a great impact on the physical and mental health of individuals. One of the aims of their paper is to explain how leisure counselling can be implemented as a therapeutic technique for the benefit of many different types of people. Leitner and Leitner first set out the goals of leisure counselling. These include, for example, gaining a basic understanding of leisure and recreation, understanding time management and leisure planning principles and being able to apply them in life and understanding how leisure behaviour can affect physical and mental health.The authors then go on to describe three approaches to leisure counselling. The first, the leisure resource guidance approach, focuses on the dissemination of information on leisure resources. This approach, they suggest, is most appropriate for high-functioning older people with well-defined leisure interests. The second, the developmental-educational approach to leisure counselling, is also suitable for high-functioning people, but it is a more involving process than leisure resource guidance leisure counselling. In the developmental-educational approach, the counsellor works closely with the client to discover new leisure interests and activities, in an attempt to broaden the client's leisure horizons. The aim here is to help the client identify an ‘ideal’ leisure lifestyle, and then assist the client to bridge the gap between their current and ideal leisure lifestyle.In contrast to the first two approaches to leisure counselling, the therapeutic-remedial approach is most appropriate for lower-functioning people or those with specific leisure-related behavioural problems. Therapeutic-remedial leisure counselling necessitates a close, empathetic relationship with the client. The therapeutic-remedial approach is similar to the developmental-educational approach in that it is an in-depth approach. However, as these authors make clear the therapeutic-remedial approach differs from the developmental-educational approach in that the counsellor is more directive, and focuses more on the remediation of specific problems rather than the exploration of broadening leisure horizons. These authors conclude by reaffirming that leisure counselling can make a significant contribution in promoting physical and psychological well-being.Cassidy's paper begins by drawing attention to the number of different ways leisure has been defined. He concludes that perhaps leisure is best considered as another life domain and in this way experiences that occur during leisure can have an impact on health and well-being. Cassidy then outlines the three main approaches to understanding the relationship between leisure and health: a stress buffering process, a main effect and as a source of stress. Central to all of these approaches, argues Cassidy, is the potential for leisure activities to both cause and reduce stress. However, what is missing when trying to understand the different approaches is what Cassidy describes as a lifespan perspective where the emphasis is on determining how leisure attitudes and behaviours are acquired and maintained in the developmental process. Since, Cassidy goes on to suggest, many of our adult behaviour patterns are learned in childhood or influenced by childhood experiences it can be assumed that leisure behaviours are also susceptible to developmental influences.Cassidy then set out to explore, using a sample of young adults, two objectives. The first was to explore the role of family, peers, school and social background in trying to understand adult patterns of leisure. The second objective was to consider the role of leisure in predicting psychological stress. In terms of the first objective the results suggested that young adults’ attitude to leisure was influenced in a positive way by having a family where, for example, there is a sense of cohesion and control and intellectual–cultural pursuits are encouraged and there was a focus on active-recreational activities and by having good relations with peers and feeling encouraged by teachers. In relation to the second objective it appeared that individuals who have a positive attitude towards leisure and engage in leisure activities are less distressed and more optimistic. Cassidy identifies three implications that flow from his results. The first is the importance of developing leisure enhancing attitudes and engagement in childhood. The second suggests that to do this it is important to understand the social and family context, whilst the third emphasises the importance of understanding those patterns of child leisure behaviour that predict constructive leisure attitudes and engagements in adulthood.Haworth and Lewis begin their paper by drawing attention to the state of flux that surrounds how work, leisure and well-being are conceptualised, reflecting in part the changing social, economic and community contexts in which work and leisure take place. These changes, they argue, have significantly altered the relationships between work, leisure and well-being and now present challenging concerns for researchers, educators and policy makers. These authors then raise the issue of the all pervasive trend towards the intensification of work and the threat that it can pose to the time and energy for leisure. Drawing on the results from two cross-national studies they conclude that the relationship between work and leisure require a global, national and local perspective in creating arrangements for satisfactory work and leisure.These authors go on to suggest that there is no one correct policy for work and leisure. In rapidly changing societies, they argue time is needed for social practices to meet new requirements. Guidance and counselling professionals, they add, should be prepared to operate not just at the individual level raising awareness of the impact of long working hours but also at the group level. Group counselling recognises that many work–leisure issues result from more structural and social constraints and so this type of counselling should aim to encourage groups to discuss their concerns and develop skills for campaigning for more radical change that recognises the importance of the work–leisure relationship.The paper by Iwasaki, Mactavish and MacKay builds on the ways in which leisure contributes to managing, relieving, or counteracting stress. Drawing from a larger project designed to enhance understanding of the meanings people attributed to stress and the coping strategies they used to deal with its emotional consequences, these authors focused their attention on the role of leisure in stress-coping, emphasising those findings that are relevant to guidance and counselling. These authors also point to the fact that their findings have a unique quality because they focused on the views of people from diverse, non-dominant social and cultural backgrounds. Their results demonstrated leisure's role as a palliative coping strategy. Their findings pointed to two ways in which leisure as a palliative strategy operates. The first they described as the ‘creation of a leisure space’. Here people intentionally create a leisure space as a means of dealing with stress. This ‘space’, their findings suggest, can create a sense of perseverance and empowerment.The second way in which leisure may operate as a palliative strategy is by offering a positive diversion or ‘time-out’ from stress and a context for rejuvenation and renewal. In this way leisure provided a positive alternative for deflecting stressful thoughts and an opportunity to ‘recharge’ and to return with renewed energy and a different perspective. Leisure was also seen as a balance—a strategy for promoting life balance or counterbalancing other life stressors. The authors also point to the implications these findings have for guidance and counselling. They first point to the process of leisure resource guidance and the idea of providing people with information about the ways in which leisure can contribute to coping and the way in which such information can become a basis for educational or developmental guidance programmes. They also suggest that knowledge about leisure coping strategies can be translated into a therapeutic resource/tool for clients under stress in order to help them effectively deal with or counteract the stress. Through the guidance and counselling process, these authors add, preferred leisure styles can be identified and creative and effective coping initiated. All these approaches, they conclude, reflect the emerging perspective of a positive clinical psychology that emphasises individual strengths and acknowledges the voice of the client.Finally, the paper by Trenberth and Dewe explores the importance of leisure in coping with work stress. They use sequential tree analysis to create score profiles and patterns as to why an involvement in leisure was important to people, why leisure was important in coping with stress and what coping strategies were actually used to cope with stress. This analysis was done within the context of the extent to which leisure was viewed as an important part of life. When the different patterns were explored a number of issues emerged. The first pointed to the active–passive dimensions of leisure and the need when designing stress management interventions to consider the benefits of providing recuperative-therapeutic opportunities in addition to the more traditional approach of simply providing active health-related activities. These authors also used the score patterns to raise issues about whether the way the different reasons for considering leisure an important means of coping with work-related stress combined and therefore fulfilled some more complex role. For example, do different combinations of motives for engaging in leisure provide some mutually supportive role or do they operate in a more facilitating, sustaining or enabling role? While these authors could only draw attention to the way patterns developed, their overall conclusions suggested that without this sort of knowledge and without a more detailed understanding of the meanings individuals give to why leisure is important intervention strategies may be overlooking the powerful role that these reasons play and the complex way in which they combine to allow leisure to play the coping role that it does.Developments at work, in organisations and in society at large are drawing attention to the importance of work–life balance. Work–life balance cannot be understood unless we continue to understand the role that leisure plays in this relationship. Leisure has been described as a coping resource and a coping strategy that has strong active and passive components. Its role as a coping strategy is, quite clearly from the papers presented, complex. This complexity should not be ignored, nor should researchers use this complexity to ignore the explanatory potential that resides in such a construct. Challenges exist for those wishing to research the role of leisure as a coping strategy. Challenges are also there for those wishing to further develop the role of leisure counselling and the knowledge that must be shared and developed by researchers and practitioners alike. There is also the challenge to better understand contextual issues and how they influence leisure attitudes.This understanding should focus not only on what may be described as more global issues like the changing nature of work and leisure but also focus at the level of the individual. Here the emphasis should be on exploring both those developmental processes that influence leisure attitudes and the way individuals assign importance to why they engage in leisure activities and how these reasons influence the role leisure is performing and the way different leisure activities are being used. All the authors appear bound by one theme. That is, if we are to fulfil our moral responsibility to those whose lives we research, then we have an obligation to continue through research and debate to develop our understanding of the role, nature and purpose of leisure and, in this way, through this knowledge, contribute to individual well-being and development.
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