April 2003
Volume 16, Number 4
Douglas A. Kleiber is professor and director of the school of health and human performance at the University of Georgia. He received a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972 and an AB in Psychology from Cornell University in 1969. He has taught previously in the department of leisure studies at the University of Illinois and in the psychology departments at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and University of Georgia.
I have worked in leisure studies, a field that is at least as likely to be called "recreation and leisure studies," for 24 years (12 at the University of Illinois and 12 here at the University of Georgia) before assuming my present duties. At the moment, serving as a full time director of a School of Health and Human Performance, I have precious little time for research of any kind. But after a year and a half in the role I have learned a great deal more than I knew before about exercise science, physical education, and health promotion than I did before. These are the other three departments in our four department structure, the fourth being the one from which I came, recreation and leisure studies.
After receiving an AB in Psychology from Cornell University I did doctoral work in educational psychology at the University of Texas, taking the opportunity to work a little with psychology department faculty Arnold Buss and Eliot Aronson while working with ed psych faculty. The most influential of those, Guy Manaster and Jere Brophy, did their doctoral work in developmental psychology at The University of Chicago. My intellectual roots were even more firmly established with the Chicago School through what has been a continuous working correspondence with Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who has contributed so steadily to the emerging "positive psychology" initiative championed by Martin Seligman among others. All of these associations were instrumental in my academic development, but I risked detaching from them and psychology in general when I jumped to leisure studies in 1977. However, there were both conceptual and practical reasons for doing so.
As an undergraduate psychology major at Cornell in the late sixties I played football, and my advisor, Jim Maas, encouraged me to acquaint myself with the emerging area of sport psychology. My status as captain of the team gave me only enough leverage with my teammates to get them to complete a personality inventory, the results of which I analyzed for differences between offense and defense and lineman and backs (Surprisingly, in retrospect, some of predicted differences were borne out!). This experience predisposed me to use my graduate program to examine the developmental significance of play and the impact of leisure activity on self-actualization, subjects that continue to interest me.
In the mid 70s, the leisure studies department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign was collecting social scientists for an interdisciplinary leisure research program, and an article I did on play and learning while in the psychology department at St. Cloud State University caught the attention of the search committee, after which they welcomed my application for a "psychology of leisure" position. The practical value of making the change was that I went from a very heavy teaching load (three courses per quarter at SCSU) to not teaching at all in my first year at UIUC, and thus I was able to do more research on the psychology of play and leisure in that one year than I would ever have been able to do in many years in my previous position.
Eventually, I learned enough about the academic field of parks, recreation and leisure services to be able to contribute to the instructional program in ways other than in my specialty area. And having tried to understand intrinsic motivation and development in the context of public school classrooms for the previous five years, the focus on the context of leisure was a welcome change. Indeed, I was fortified by the conviction that play and self-expression had important developmental benefits. The fact that many of my new colleagues were public-spirited individuals who took as their mission the provision of opportunities to enhance such activity also contributed to what struck me as an agreeable working environment.
Demands for accountability in all public sector areas in the early 80s and the influx of social scientists in recreation and leisure studies raised the profile for research and evaluation in that field. Managers of leisure services were compelled to demonstrate the social, psychological and economic "benefits" of their planning and programming, to both communities and to individuals, particularly those with disabilities or disadvantages.
The move to leisure studies led me to do forego a membership in the American Educational Research Association for one in the National Recreation and Park Association, but I maintained my membership in psychology organizations for awhile, ultimately becoming a founding member of APS, and established working relationships with faculty at UIUC who had an interest in achievement motivation. I collaborated with Martin Maehr on the subject of intrinsic motivation, achievement motivation, and aging, including editing and contributing chapters in the Advances in Motivation and Achievement series (JAI Press).
I found that my interest in motivation, expressive behavior, and developmental transitions was compatible with concerns of people in special education and recreation therapy who were working on the problem of school-to-work transitions for individuals with developmental disabilities. A federal grant in that area supported the beginnings of what has become a 20-year program of research on self-expression in relation to developmental transitions. Colleagues and I have given particular attention to the significance of leisure experience in adjusting to spinal cord injury. Some of this work has led me to an association with faculty in the psychology department here at UGA. Partly as a result, I was recently offered adjunct status with that department, thus bringing me full circle in one respect.
Working outside of mainstream academic psychology, I have found not only the opportunity to do psychological research and stay connected with the field, I have also found that there are a good number of scholars with training in academic psychology who are using it to address a wide variety of problems. In additional to leisure studies, which has had its share of those with training and advanced degrees in psychology, health promotion and behavior, sport psychology and exercise science. Exercise psychology, in particular, is a prominent program in Exercise Science with laboratory research on exercise adherence and the impact of exercise on emotion and cognition. While administrative responsibilities have taken me away from some of my own research interests, I have come to an even greater appreciation of the extent to which psychology is a preoccupying discipline for many in programs outside of traditional psychology departments and for the collaboration opportunities that are created as a result.
