Hello, all. I said that I would post a summary of the results of my project when I could. I'm still working on analyzing the data, but I have some preliminary results that I can share. I felt that the project that you all participated in might not make much sense without context, so I've given you a little information about my overall research program. It's a long post and I apologize for that. Thanks again to everyone who participated.
Larry
This might be more than you want to know, but…
For a long time, I had been informally wondering why people build models. If you grant me that a doll and a toy animal are models, then people have been making models for as long as there have been people. Then I heard a talk at a conference in which the speaker pointed out that one of the areas of human behavior that psychology had rarely – if ever – explored was hobbies. That’s when I formally decided to explore the psychology of hobbies.
I took a sabbatical leave in the fall of 2011, in large part to give myself several uninterrupted months to read whatever literature existed on hobbies. What I found was a mess. Some people argued that hobbies were beneficial. Some argued that hobbies were harmful. Some claimed that hobbies had physical benefits, but others that they had mental benefits. The problem was that everyone meant something different by “hobby” and none of them ever seemed to mean an activity that I’d ever seen represented in a hobbyshop (and I’ve been in a lot of hobbyshops over the years). It became clear that the first thing I was going to have to do was to define the word “hobby.”
The definition that I chose to adopt was proposed by historian Steven Gelber. He defined a hobby as “a voluntary activity, usually engaged in alone, at home, using relatively simple tools to produce an object with economic value.” (Economic value doesn’t mean monetary value. It’s a broader concept that includes the worth of the object to a person.) I wasn’t going to get very far convincing people (other than my undergraduate research assistants) to adopt that definition just because I said so. I needed to show that Gelber’s definition captured the core of what people meant when they used the word hobby, even though some people used the word more broadly. That led to my first project.
In that project, I asked a sample of people (who were not given the definition) to rate their level of agreement with a series of statements of the form “X is a hobby”, where X was some leisure activity. I also had a separate group of people rate each of the activities on how closely it matched Gelber’s definition of a hobby. Then I correlated the ratings. As I expected, the more closely an activity matched Gelber’s definition, the more likely participants were to agree that it was a hobby. (If you want some of the technical details, I actually did a regression analysis using the 5 characteristics from Gelber’s definition to predict the level of agreement that the activity was a hobby. I obtained an R2 of .58). I’m currently prepping that paper for submission to a journal.
My second project was influenced in part by some comments I received when I submitted the definition for the first time. I submitted it to a leisure science journal and they got all bent out of shape because I didn’t define leisure (for what it’s worth, I’m not sure that leisure scientists have adequately defined leisure, but that’s a rabbit hole that I do not want to fall down). A second influence was John Holland’s work on the relationship of personality and vocational choice. In his 1973 book, Holland made a brief reference to the idea that his personality types might also be related to avocational choice, but he never followed up on it. The goal of the project was to explore whether there was a relationship between personality (I measured personality using both Holland’s types and the Big 5 dimensions of personality) and leisure activity choice. In a nutshell, I did find a relationship between certain aspects of personality and choice of a primary leisure activity. I hope to start writing up those results in a formal report very soon (I did, however, present my findings at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in March of 2016).
That ended up being a big project with a focus on a typology of leisure activities, but that wasn’t what got me into this line of research. I was interested in hobbyists, modelers in particular. Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few modelers refer to modeling as an art form and it’s not hard to see similarities between building models (making visual representations of objects in the world) and the visual arts (making visual representations of objects in the world). I began to wonder whether modelers and artists were similar or different in how they approached their activities and in why they did them. That led to the most project that you participated in. In another nutshell, a very preliminary look at the data suggests that modelers and artists do what they do for different reasons (both report their activity as a creative outlet, but modelers want the model whereas artists want to express emotion), they think about the things that they create in different ways (modelers display their models, but artists tend to dispose of their art), and they differ in certain aspects of personality. Further, while they don’t differ in terms of their satisfaction with life or self-esteem, artists tend to feel more stress and to report more symptoms of depression than modelers.