RESEARCH
Exploring one of the most understudied aspects of our life.
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
Shintaro's research aims to understand how people experience leisure, and more importantly why they live a leisure life that they have. This involves studying what constrains or motivates people's leisure experience, and what outcomes people derive from their leisure. Shintaro is also interested in how different and similar people's leisure experience is across different cultures.
CURRENT PROJECTS
LEISURE'S ROLES IN POST-DISASTER PSYCHOSOCIAL RECOVERIES OF OLDER ADULTS
Funded by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), the international research team from Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, and Canada explores how natural disasters affect the mental health of older survivors, and what key roles leisure plays in supporting their psychosocial recovery journeys. It involves over 55 in-depth interviews with survivors and community supporters.
WELL-BEING APP FOR RURAL IMMIGRANT YOUTH IN ALBERTA
Funded by the Canada's First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) project called the Bridging Divides, we work with a community of immigrant youths, supporting professionals, and researchers to co-create an app to support holistic well-being for immigrant youths living in rural Alberta. Using a community-based participatory research design (CBPR), we listen to unique challenges immigrant youths in rural communities face and work together to generate creative solutions for their well-being support. Learn more on the Toronto Metropolitan University website.
APP-BASED LEISURE EDUCATION (ABLE)
Funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), we co-create a leisure education app with a community of university students with equity-denied backgrounds (e.g., BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, Living with Disabilities) and university . The app and associated intervention is to enhance the mental health and well-being of diverse students. This project is a successor to the ONLEI project, and is using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design.
ONLINE SPORT GAMBLING
Funded by the Alberta Gambling Research Institute (AGRI), we have conducted high-quality surveys about online sport gambling, especially single-event betting, mental health and well-being, problematic and responsive gambling behaviours, and various psychosocial predictors with student and general populations in Alberta and Western Canada, respectively. In particular, the survey with gamblers in West Canada is a 3-wave longitudinal design.
PAST PROJECTS
ONLINE LEISURE EDUCATION INTERVENTIONS (ONLEI)
The objective of this project is to co-create a mobile app-based intervention to enhance well-being holistically among immigrant youths who live in rural Alberta. Through a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design, immigrant youths, professionals, and researchers will work together to identify key topics to be addressed in such an intervention, while also aligning the app and intervention characteristics with unique needs of immigrant youths in rural Alberta. Learn more on the Toronto Metropolitan University website.
LEISURE AND IKIGAI, OR LIFE WORTH LIVING
This was Shintaro's doctoral research developping a theory of the relationships between leisure and ikigai (i.e., life worth living in Japanese), using the mixed methods research design. The first qualitative study guided by grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) created a substantive theory on the topic based on photo elicitation data from Japanese university students. The second quantitative study tested this theory, using partial least squares structural equation modeling (Hair et al., 2017), with online survey data collected from a larger sample of Japanese university students.
LEISURE-TIME PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND CONSTRAINTS
This cross-cultural research project was led by collaborator Dr. Eiji Ito (Wakayama University, Japan) conducting free-descriptive online surveys with Japanese and Euro-Canadian adults to learn about what constrained their LTPA participation and how they negotiated such constraints. Based on this information, new typologies of constraints and negotiation were developped, as well as new survey items. We used these items in the follow-up cross-cultural survey to examine their validity. My contributions have been methodological.
LEISURE AFTER NATURAL DISASTERS
This was Shintaro's Master's research conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After seeing the devastation caused by the 3.11 tsunami and earthquake in Japan, Shintaro worked to understand how leisure experiences after the disasters helped survivors recover psychologically. This qualitative study was based on semi-structured interviews with survivors and disaster volunteers as well as Shintaro's field observations.