The ways and quality of leisure experience are relatively often the subject of research in different social sciences across the world. Leisure (leisure time) is primarily the interest of sociologists, but is often focused on by researchers from other social sciences, i.e. psychology, economics, pedagogy or andragogy. The interest of researchers witness that leisure is a phenomena which needs to be understood as a very important part of human lives in the contemporary world and the importance of leisure is not valued enough or sufficiently researched.
One of crucial problems we are trying to solve when we try to compare the results of leisure research, is the inavailability of research results for comparison, because of the excessive diversity and inner structure of leisure experiences. For this diversity much research is relatively closely focused on a specific area, and profile their research to answer only a few questions or topics. That is why the research methods are also adapted. The outcome of this situation is that there is a lot of published research in journals, but they are not practically comparable at least in some key categories.
To prevent the methodological diversity approaching the leisure research, we developed in 2007 the first version of the catalogue of leisure activities, which allows both an analytical and a syntetical view of measured data. Since 2007 the catalogue has been changed many times, usually because of important correlations with factors influencing the leisure experiences which have been found. Among these factors, the most important are values which are strongly related to leisure and it seems that leisure is, more than in other aspects of human lives, the space in which real values are shown.
In the near future we plan to extend the technological solution of the catalogue and allow it to provide an online analysis, including the analysis of significant correlations based on research data collected by other researchers.
We suppose the catalogue will find its place among research instruments of leisure in the Czech Republic and across the world. We hope the internationalization of the catalogue will be massively supported by its release in English and other languages.