ABSTRACT

Since the 1960s there has been a burgeoning literature on leisure forecasting. In the 1960s, when researchers, planners and policy-makers involved with leisure began to turn their attention to questions of forecasting, the environment in which they were working was entirely different from the situation in the 1980s. Leisure forecasting of two decades ago was concerned not so much with changing tastes and trends in leisure activity but with the long-term effects on participation of underlying demographic and socioeconomic changes. The problem is that the demand for leisure is a much more slippery concept than the demand for services as education or housing. Information on levels of participation in leisure is largely obtained from social surveys. The pattern of a great deal of leisure behaviour outside the home is affected by the availability and spatial distribution of facilities for leisure.