Older Adults, Perseverance Strategies, and Serious Leisure Activities: A Qualitative Study

Participation in serious leisure is shown to promote overall healthy aging. One quality of serious leisure is participants’ ability to persevere when facing obstacles to participation. There is limited research on perseverance strategies within the domain of serious leisure, particularly in an aging context. This study aimed to explore perseverance strategies used by older adults while they engaged in endurance sports as a form of serious leisure. Two overarching research questions were presented: What perseverance strategies were used, and when were these strategies used? This study used qualitative description methodology with a phenomenological approach. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and underwent thematic analysis. There were 15 participants (average age 67 years) who were active in running, cycling, swimming, kayaking, and triathlons. Findings demonstrated that different perseverance strategies were used by participants as they went through the four action phases of Gollwitzer (1990)’s goal pursuit process.