Investigation of participations of sport center members to serious leisure time activities

The purpose of this study is to examine the serious leisure time participation levels of individuals using recreational sports centers in Ankara in terms of different variables. As serious leisure participants, 513 people (239 women, 274 men) participated in the survey, representing from six recreational sports centers located in different districts in Ankara. The 'Serious and Casual Leisure Measure (CKBZ)' consisting 42 items and 9 sub-dimension developed by Akyıldız (2013) was used in the research. These factors are labelled as leisure career, feeling of competence, psychosocial benefit, therapeutic benefit, social world, commitment, personality, perseverance, and personal effort. SPSS 21.0 for Windows Package Program was used to analyze the data. In the statistical analysis, descriptive statistics was used to identify participants' demographic profiles and T-Test was used to determine whether a significant difference between the CKBZ scale subscales in terms of gender. In addition, ANOVA test was applied for all other variables (age, marital status, education status, family income status, exercise intention, duration of exercise, duration of facility transportation). The Tukey HSD test was applied to determine which groups resulted in significant differences. According to research findings, the highest score of the serious leisure participants in the sports center belongs to the "Trepatik Benefit" sub-dimension while the minimum score belongs to the "Social Benefit" sub-dimension. In addition, there is a significant difference between the serious leisure scores of the sports center members and the age, marital status, educational status, family income status, exercise intention, duration of exercise, duration of facility transportation. Key Words: Serious leisure, recreation, sports center