Research Paper on:
Leisure Through A Lifetime

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
conveys a great deal of information about how individuals reacted to societal expectations, and the demands placed on them regarding the goals of human development across a lifetime. There is  evidence offered in leisure research that suggests that how well individuals negotiate their leisure time has strong implications for their level of personal satisfaction and happiness in old age.  Using primarily the theoretical framework developed by Erik Erikson in the 1960s, the following research consists of a case study in which a 70-year-old participant, "Amy," was interviewed concerning leisure  activities throughout her lifetime. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the role of leisure within the context of a personal life narrative. Leisure research, literature review Leisure  research shows that there are three types of influences on how individuals structure their free time: normative age-graded influences; normative history graded influences; and non-normative life events (Mannell and Kleiber,  1997). The first category refers to events that individuals feel compelled to enact according to their age, that is, one gets a job in their twenties, marries and has kids  by their early thirties, etc. How much free time individuals enjoy is also affected by historical events, such as involvement in war or by broad sociological trends. The last  category refers to personal unexpected events, such as divorce or disability (Mannell and Kleiber, 1997). A major landmark study on leisure activity across the life span was conducted in  the 1970s by Gordon, Gaitz and Scott and this study involved 1,441 participants who ranged in ages from 20 to 94 (Mannell and Kleiber, 1997). The results of this investigation  showed that leisure activity decreases with age, except for very few exceptions, such as "solitary activity and cooking among men" (Mannell and Kleiber, 1997, p. 247). Additional leisure research studies