Association Between Personality Traits and Attending a Fitness Center

Abstract

The sports and recreation industry is emerging in Taiwan. Few related studies have used it as a sample. This study has been designed to explore the notion of personality traits based on fitness center members in Taiwan. Because of its validity and wide use (Furnham, Moutafi, & Crump, 2003), the Five Factor Model (FFM) developed by McCrae and John (1992) is adopted in this study to assess the personality of fitness center members. The measurement scale of personality traits is cited from Saucier's (1994) Mini-Markers. The empirical findings reveal that those people with low tendency to experience negative emotions, i.e., neuroticism, and high tendency to experience positive emotions, i.e., extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, will join the fitness center. Sports and recreation industry managers can design strategy to satisfy their customer needs based on these findings.

Development of the serious and casual leisure measure

“…According to the findings, extraverted people participate in many leisure activities very intensely and choose more adventurous and intense activities than introverts (Kovacs, 2007). Researchers have also found that extraverts prefer social activities more than their introverted counterparts (Argyle & Lu, 1990) and personality traits of extraversion are significantly related to greater overall leisure participation (Chen, Lee, & Chang, 2007;Kovacs, 2007;Lu & Hu, 2005;Lu & Kao, 2009;Tok, 2011). In the case of the neuroticism trait, some studies (Kovacs, 2007;Lu & Hu, 2005;Tok, 2011) suggested that it was negatively associated with leisure involvement.…”