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Digging Disciplines Deeper: Thoughts Arising from Commentaries by Shaw, Samdahl, Dawson, and Witt

IntroductionThe conventions of writing an academic, empirical article for a research journal such as the Journal of Leisure Research usually dictate a rigidly-defined content that follows a pre-determined structure. The normal "Background" section, for example, typically consists of a review of the literature most closely related to the study, and-if it is done well-identifies not only what is known about the subject-matter of the study, but also what is not known. These gaps in knowledge are then used to identify the study's objectives and to provide the foundation for a subsequent discussion of how the study has contributed to knowledge (see Kelly, 1999, p. 148, for advice that all writers of such articles should heed!).Given the relative freedom of how to position this "reply" to four commentaries on my "Leisure research by Canadians and Americans: One community or two solitudes" article, I have chosen to begin with a personal statement and not with an academic/literature background. This should not only clarify the purpose of the article that the four commentators and I are discussing, and the objectives of the larger study of which it is a part, but it should also provide the foundation for a more generally-oriented response to the comments from colleagues, as well as to point to directions and questions that could profitably be addressed in the future. I believe that these are issues that members of the North American leisure studies community ought to be concerned about.After I had read the four commentaries on my article by Susan Shaw, Diane Samdahl, Don Dawson, and Peter Witt, my first inclination was to decline to write a reply. This was not because I felt the commentators' critiques were indefensible. On the contrary, I thought that a simple and straightforward, "I agree with everything you say; thank you for taking the time to do this" would suffice. However, as I began to reflect on my colleagues' remarks, and realizing that, rather than writing detailed critical reviews, they had instead chosen to use my article as a springboard to raise issues that were only implied by my data and conclusions, I decided to respond in kind. In preparing early drafts of this reply, I also found myself reflecting on how I came to be involved in recreation and leisure studies, and how the concerns that I have arose out of observations I have made over the years of my involvement. Thus, I intend to use this "reply" not only as an opportunity to comment on and extend my colleagues' thoughts, but also to voice some concerns about leisure studies in general that were part of my motivation for initiating the research project in the first place, even if they were not directly addressed in the original article.Why I Began The StudyA Personal BackgroundAs an academic trained in urban, behavioural, and historical geography, it was never my original intention to become a "leisure researcher," either within the sub-discipline of recreation geography or more broadly within the interdisciplinary field of recreation and leisure studies. In fact my initial involvement occurred purely by chance: although hired to teach courses on environmental impacts and resource management, I was asked, immediately upon my arrival as a junior assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Alberta in 1975, to supervise a graduate recreation-related thesis, which ultimately produced my first recreation research publication (Foster & Jackson, 1979). Then, I was asked to offer a graduate seminar course-"Geography of Outdoor Recreation"-previously taught by a senior colleague who had moved on to other interests.As I am sure is the case for many colleagues in the field, my subsequent involvement in leisure studies, and the directions it has taken, have also occurred more by chance than by design. I became interested in outdoor recreation and environmental attitudes, for example, both as an extension of some work I was doing in the late 1970s and early 1980s on environmental attitudes and energy conservation, and as a result of casually browsing journals and discovering the few articles that had been published on outdoor recreation and environmental attitudes up to that time. …