Leisure Constraints and Negotiation Strategies among Malaysian Women's Participation in Sport Tourism

There has been positive expansion of research on women's leisure constraints in various disciplines but none was on Malaysian women's sport tourism participation. Furthermore leisure constraints experienced by Malaysian women differed significantly from those experienced by the general population as they have to adhere to cultural tradition to a greater extent than others. Therefore, this study explored the leisure constraints and negotiation strategies among Malaysian women's participation in sport tourism events. Besides that it assists in understanding the evolution of leisure in general as research of different cultural backgrounds would greatly enhance the leisure
constraints literature. A self-administered questionnaire adapted from Crawford et al.'s hierarchical model of leisure constraints (1991), Chick and Dong's (2003) leisure
constraints across culture scale, and Hubbard and Mannell (2001) negotiation strategies scale was developed for this study. Multistage cluster random sampling with proportion
design was used to draw samples and data collected from 636 respondents were analyzed using SPSS-PC. The results reveal that Malaysian women perceived a combination of interpersonal constraints, structural constraints, intrapersonal constraints, and cultural constraints with interpersonal constraints most highly perceived in sport tourism participation. The identification of cultural factor reading "I am obliged to visit my parents/grandparents when I have holidays" as the leisure constraint most highly perceived by Malaysian women clearly indicates that cultural constraints component plays important role in deciding the levels of sport tourism participation among Malaysian women. Analysis revealed that age, ethnic, marital status, occupation, and monthly family income factors do partially influenced Malaysian women's perception of leisure constraints in sport tourism participation. A combination of interpersonal coordination, skill acquisition, financial resources, and time management strategies place some Malaysian women in a better position to negotiate leisure constraints in sport tourism with majority adopting interpersonal coordination factors. Age, ethnic, marital status, occupation, and monthly family income factors do partially affect the adoption of
negotiation strategies components in sport tourism participation. Significant relationship existed between negotiation strategies and the overall leisure constraints of Malaysian women participating in sport tourism controlling for age, ethnic, marital status, occupation and monthly family income groups. It could be assumed that age, ethnic, marital status, occupation and monthly family income groups did not affect the relationships between Malaysian women's adoption of negotiation strategies with the overall leisure constraints perceived in sport tourism participations.