ABSTRACT
Understanding why human beings engage in recreational and tourism activities is an increasingly important and complex area of research for social scientists. Historically, geographers have played only a limited part in developing the literature on the behavioural aspects of recreational and tourists’ use of free time (Jackson 1988), tending to have a predisposition towards the analysis of aggregate patterns of demand using quantitative measures and statistical sources. In only a few cases have theoretical and qualitative approaches been used (e.g. Stokowski 2002) which embody notions of leisure and place. This almost rigid demarcation of research activity has, with a few exceptions (e.g. Goodall 1990; Mansfeld 1992), meant that behavioural research in recreation and tourism has only since the early 1990s made any impact on the wider research community (see e.g. Walmesley and Lewis 1993 on the geographer’s approach to behavioural research), with notable studies (e.g. Walmesley and Jenkins 1992; Jenkins and Walmesley 1993) applying spatial principles to the analysis of recreational and tourism behaviour. Since the early 1990s, geographers have begun to identify how the demand for leisure and tourism has resulted in geographies of leisure and tourism specific to certain social, ethnic, gendered and marginalised groups (e.g. disabled people) and the meanings they attach to the spaces they consume in their leisure time, or are unable to consume due to barriers and constraints. As McAvoy’s (2002) work demonstrates, there are distinct place meanings attached to the ways that Native American Indians and white Americans value and use leisure resources. The results are a series of leisure and tourism landscapes, socially, culturally and politically constructed for different groups of people (Aitchison et al. 2000).
