Determining the factors that hinder public from participating leisure time activities (Example of the city of Erzurum)

The aim of this study are to determine the factors which are constraints in active participation in recreational activities of 236 (50,6%) male and 230 (49,4%) female participants who live in the city of Erzurum and to compare these factors according to some variables (age, gender, marital status, educational level, wealth level, weekly leisure time duration and situation of having problem of spending free time). Data collection tools constraints of 3 parts. In the first part, a questionnaire directed to describing the demographic information of the attendees, in the second, a questionnaire for determining the leisure time behaviours were used and in the third, "Leisure Constraints Scale", which was developed by Alexandris and Carroll (1997) and was conducted in the study of the validity and reliability for Turkish Society by Karaküçük and Gürbüz (2006) was used. The scale is consisted of 27 articles and 6 sub dimensions like (a) facility/service &transportation (article 8), (b) social environment & lack of information (article 5), (c) individual's psychology (article 4), (d) lack of friend (article 3), (e) time (article 4) and (f) lack of interest (article 3) to define the reasons for constraints preventing individuals from participating in leisure time activities. Articles in the scale "Definitely Important (1)" and "Unimportant (3)", "Important (3)", and "Very Important (4)" are evaluated with quartet likert type scale. Cronbach Alfa, which was calculated to test the reliability of the scale, gave us the result of coefficient of internal consistency changing between 0,647 (time) and 0,773 (social environment/lack of information) for sub dimensions. According to the independent samples t-test analyse results which was applied to test the differences of the participants depending on the marital status and gender in 6 sub dimensions of the scale used in the study: it was detected that there are significant differences in "individual's psychology", "social environment & lack of information", "facility/service & transportation", "lack of friend" according to gender and there are significant differences in "individual's psychology", "facility/service & transportation", "time" according to marital status. Also, according to ANOVA results, it has been found that there are significant differences in some sub dimensions according to age, gender, the number of children, educational level, wealth level and weekly leisure time durations. Key Words: Leisure time, recreation, constraints, people in Erzurum