Migrants' leisure participation: Benefits and constraints

Leisure participation alleviates much of the acculturative stress that migrants commonly suffer when settling in a new country. This exploratory paper examined the trends and challenges in migrants' leisure participation in their early years of settlement through semistructured interviews conducted with migrants and representatives from migration and leisure organisations in South Australia. Idea-networking analysis produced five prominent themes. The major theme was migrants' need for leisure activities as a coping strategy to mitigate acculturative stress. However, the remaining themes revealed a dark side to migrants' leisure participation: employment challenges; perceived discrimination; financial issues and family obligations. These constraints contributed to migrants' acculturative stress, whilst simultaneously obstructing them from participating in leisure activities that could help alleviate that stress. The study confirms the utility of migrants' leisure participation in reducing acculturative stress, and extends the literature by identifying that leisure access is an important issue since migrants often experience multiple leisure constraints.