Bibliometric Analysis of Stebbins’s Serious Leisure Theory in Tourism and Recreation

Abstract

Robert Stebbins has contributed to the field of leisure with his ethnographic studies for the years. Although the historical process of the serious leisure time studies developed by Stebbins goes back to the past in the world, it has a new agenda in Turkey. The aim of the study is to make a bibliometric analysis of the studies using Stebbins' serious leisure theory, as well as to reveal the weight of the use of this theory in academic studies in the field of tourism and recreation and to make guiding contributions to future studies. The sample of the study; in the Scopus database, there are 458 studies using the keywords "Serious Leisure" and "Robert Stebbins" as "title" and "keyword" between 1973 when the theory was introduced and 2022 today. Frequency analysis and Vosviewer statistical program were used in the data analysis process of the study. The data were interpreted under different headings. According to the findings of the study, it can be said that 51 studies using the keywords "Recreation" and "Serious Leisure" and 54 studies using the keywords "Tourism" and "Serious Leisure" were published between 1996-2022. The distribution of the studies according to the years, according to the sources they were published, according to the authors, according to the institutions in which they were published, according to the countries in which they were published, according to the type of publication, according to the subject areas and according to the highest number of citations are shown.