Influência do lazer sério na felicidade, na satisfação com a vida, na simplicidade voluntária e no consumo experiencial de seus praticantes

Abstract

Serious leisure is undertaken systematically and is so meaningful and exciting to practitioners that they embark on a leisure career, wanting to practice it long-term. As a result, serious leisure brings social and psychological benefits that may be reaped throughout its practice, impacting practitioners' emotions. Emotions can lead people's behavior, showing to be important for the purchase decision. Given the above, serious leisure may be an antecedent of emotions and, consequently, influence consumption. Furthermore, happiness and life satisfaction among serious leisure practitioners may influence how they consume and the type of consumption they perform (material versus experiential). Therefore, with the purpose of investigating consumption behavior and emotional factors, this thesis aims to propose and test a theoretical model representing the relationship between serious leisure, happiness, life satisfaction, voluntary simplicity, and experiential consumption of serious leisure practitioners. To this end, quantitative descriptive research was carried out based on a survey with 395 runners and 420 cyclists. The data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling statistics, average tests, and moderation test. The main results highlight that serious leisure positively influences happiness and voluntary simplicity, and that happiness positively influences voluntary simplicity and experiential consumption for the total sample. However, for the cyclist sample, the relationship between serious leisure and voluntary simplicity was not confirmed, and for the runner sample, the relationship between happiness and voluntary simplicity was not confirmed. Among the moderation effects identified, the effect of hours of activity practiced for the cyclist sample on the relationship between serious leisure and voluntary simplicity stands out. The main implications of this study indicate that actions could be developed so that the population practices different forms of leisure. Moreover, some leisure could be serious and bring individual and social benefits, mainly due to social interactions, resulting in a happier, healthier, less sick and more pro-social population. In this way, the reduction in consumption would be accomplished through the individual's internal control, which possibly makes it more effective, because, besides being conscious, it is a voluntary decision that is in harmony with the life that the person proposes to live. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]