Serious leisure, information practices, and social support in active aging: Evidence from Taiwan’s senior fitness clubs

Vollständiger Abstract

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This study applies Stebbins’s Serious Leisure Perspective to examine how information seeking and social support mediate the relationship between sustained leisure engagement and active aging. Drawing on data from Taiwan’s Senior Fitness Clubs, a mixed-method design was employed, combining a survey of 311 older adults with 15 semi-structured interviews. Structural Equation Modeling tested the relationships among six serious leisure traits and three dimensions of active aging, namely health promotion, social participation, and life security. The results show that perseverance, leisure career, and personal effort significantly predict information seeking, which in turn enhances health-related outcomes. Durable benefits are positively associated with social support, strengthening participation and collective engagement. Qualitative findings indicate that information practices develop from individual learning to reciprocal knowledge sharing within the community. The study contributes to information behavior research by demonstrating how long-term motivational structures shape informational and relational processes in later life. It proposes a relational framework that explains how information seeking and social support function as complementary pathways linking leisure participation to active aging outcomes.