Re-conceptualizing Recreation-based Social Worlds

Social worlds are a distinct form of human organization in which individuals organize themselves by using communication channels to spread knowledge and culture around a shared interest. Over the past thirty years, the leisure sciences have increasingly used the social world vernacular to describe population samples of recreation-based groups. While important to the leisure and recreation disciplines, social world vernacular can be confusing, often leading to improper use. This research returns to the original definition of social worlds created by Shibutani and reexamines what social worlds were intended to be in the context of recreation and tourism. By reexamining the original definition of social worlds, the researchers identified three major characteristics and those characteristics’ ability to predict and make comparisons among social worlds and their membership. These characteristics include a social world’s shared culture, shared communication channels, and shared knowledge. The characteristics were first used to predict social world membership amongst two social worlds. Next, they were consolidated and assessed on their ability to compare and contrast four different groups’ three social worlds including the social worlds of featherbowling, surfing and Humans vs. Zombies, and individuals who engaged in the recreation-activity of bowling. This also assisted in the development of the Social World Strength Profile, a visual mapping of the characteristics of a social world as a representation of that social world’s strength. Finally, this research addressed travel intention amongst the social world of surfing using the three characteristics to identify if they had any predictive ability on a surfer’s intention to travel for surfing in the next two