The In modern society, leisure activities are sometimes considered more important than work, as more individuals enjoy leisure activities such as exercise, recreational activities, and sport participation through the remarkable increase in leisure time. According to the US Department of Labor [1], 95.6% of respondents spent even a short amount of time per day for leisure activities, utilizing an average of 5.27 h per day for leisure activities. The most common leisure activity was watching television (2.77 h/day), followed by social activities (0.65 h/day) and exercise and sport participation (0.29 h/day). Demographically, older adults aged 65 and over enjoyed leisure activities most frequently (7.41 h/day), while those aged 35–44 years old provided leisure activities only 4.08 h per day. In addition, men (5.69 h/day) spent about 49 min more on leisure activities than women (4.87 h/day) [1].
Leisure can be described as an experience which is internally motivated and free from work or other mandatory activities [2, 3]. Cordes and Ibrahim [4] described the three essential elements of leisure as perceived freedom on the experience at will, autotelic activity with intrinsic motivation, and beneficial outcome through leisure activities. As such, leisure can be comprehensively determined by active activities such as sports participations and tourism, as well as passive activities including reading and meditation [5, 6].
As the number of leisure activity participants has increased, many studies that examine how leisure activities affect participants’ satisfaction have been conducted. One study determined that participation in exercise and physical activities during leisure time was a statistically significant predictor of older adults’ life satisfaction levels [5]. The study by Ayyildi and Gokyurek [7] indicated that participation in recreational dance activities and leisure satisfaction were statistically related based on age group, income and education level, marital status, and parental status. Another study showed the significant relationship between family leisure satisfaction and satisfaction with family life [8]. Thus, results from these studies have indicated that participation in leisure activities were closely connected to physical, psychological, and social benefits and satisfaction [3, 9, 10].
To support this research, instruments and questionnaires have been created and developed to measure participants’ satisfaction levels [11, 12]. Among these methods, Beard and Ragheb [11] created and developed the Leisure Satisfaction Scale (LSS) to measure individual leisure satisfaction levels. The LSS is composed of 51 items and each item is measured utilizing a five-point Likert-type scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) in which the higher scores are higher leisure satisfaction levels. More specifically, these 51 LSS items form up to six subscales including: psychological (13 items), educational (12 items), social (11 items), relaxation (4 items), physiological (6 items), and aesthetic (5 items) satisfaction. At this time, reliability test of LSS was assessed by administrating the sample of 603 individuals, which included students, professionals, technical workers, and retirees. Then, it was assessed with another sample of 347 subjects, after which some changes and refinements were administrated. Through the assessment of two samples, this instrument demonstrated it was reliable for measuring individual leisure satisfaction level. Further, Beard and Ragheb [11] sampled four items from each subscale to reduce the approximate 20 min measurement time of the LSS. They developed 24 items into the LSS-short form, which reduced measurement time to no more than 10 min and attained an internal consistency of 0.93.
Several studies have utilized the LSS and LSS-short form to conduct research into leisure satisfaction [13,14,15,16,17]. However, there have only been limited studies to indicate the validity of the LSS and LSS-short form. Originally, validity of the LSS was evaluated by approximately 160 leisure and recreation professionals and was generally suggested to be useful tool. However, their responses can be interpreted as the logical validity method in which the scale emerges as a metric to measure leisure satisfaction [11]. Recently, Trotter et al. [18] conducted research that compared the Adolescent Leisure Interest Profile (ALIP) developed by Henry [12] with the LSS-short form by using a group of 37 adolescent subjects. The results indicated that concurrent validity between LSS-short form and ALIP was found to be very weak or unrelated. Another study measured the validity of LSS-short form by estimating from 515 Korean college students and adults that the results showed the LSS would be appropriate to utilize [19]. However, there has been limited research on the LSS-short form that would provide sufficient evidence to utilize it to measure individual leisure satisfaction levels.
The Rasch rating scale model based on Item Response Theory (IRT) has been suggested because the evidence showed that the Rasch rating scale model can reduce more errors by removing statistically irrelevant items [20, 21]. Therefore, the purpose of this study aimed to reevaluate the LSS-short form questionnaires so that it would be appropriate to apply them to measure individual leisure satisfaction levels by utilizing the Rasch rating scale model: (1) Rating scale fit; (2) Item fit; (3) Differential Item Functioning (DIF); and (4) Person-Item map.