The purpose of this study was to better understand the causes of boredom using psychologically based and social control models of boredom. For this study, 82 8th grade students completed two questionnaires, a face to face interview, and participated in a four day activity diary over a two week period of time. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to assess the extern to which adolescents' level of boredom differed depending upon their reason for participating in the activity and on the individual characteristics they brought to the situation. Both psychological and social control variables helped to explain boredom. The results are discussed from a developmental and practical perspective.

This paper documents the development and first year evaluation of the Time Wise: Learning Lifelong Leisure Skills curriculum, which aims to increase positive free time use, and mitigate or prevent the initiation of substance use and abuse. The sample was comprised of 634 school youth attending nine middle schools in a rural area in eastern United States. Results from self-report data indicate that students who received the Time Wise curriculum reported being less amotivated and more motivated by identified and introjected forms of motivation. Students in Time Wise reported being better able to restructure boring situations into something more interesting; having higher levels of decision making skills, initiative, community awareness; and participating in new interests, sports, and nature-based activities.

This study investigates changes in self-reported motivation for leisure due to participation in Health Wise, a high school curriculum aimed at decreasing risk behavior and promoting health behavior. Participants were 2,193 mixed race adolescents (M = 14 years old) from 9 schools (4 intervention, 5 control) near Cape Town, South Africa. Students in the Health Wise school with the greatest involvement in teacher training and implementation fidelity reported increased intrinsic and identified motivation and decreased introjected motivation and amotivation compared to students in control schools. These results point to the potential for intervention programming to influence leisure motivation among adolescents in South Africa and represent a first step toward identifying leisure motivation as a mediator of program effects.

As the push for evidence-based programming gathers momentum, many human services programs and interventions are under increased scrutiny to justify their effectiveness across different conditions and populations. Government agencies and the public want to be assured that their resources are being put to good use on programs that are effective and efficient (Guskey, 2000). Thus, programs are increasingly based on theory and evaluated through randomized control trials using longitudinal data. Despite this progress, hypothesized outcomes are often not detected and/or their effect sizes are small (Gingiss, Roberts-Gray, Boerm, 2006). Moreover, findings may go against intuition or “gut feelings” on the part of project staff. Given the need to understand how program implementation issues relate to outcomes, this study focuses on whether process measures that focus on program implementation and fidelity can shed light on associated outcomes. In particular, we linked the process evaluation of the HealthWise motivation lesson with outcomes across four waves of data collection. We hypothesized that HealthWise would increase learners’ intrinsic and identified forms of motivation, and decrease amotivation and extrinsic motivation. We did not hypothesize a direction of effects on introjected motivation due to its conceptual ambiguity. Data came from youth in four intervention schools (n = 902, 41.1%) and five control schools (n = 1291, 58.9%) who were participating in a multi-cohort, longitudinal study. The schools were in a township near Cape Town, South Africa. For each cohort, baseline data are collected on learners as they begin Grade 8. We currently have four waves of data collected on the first cohort, which is the focus of this paper. The mean age of the sample at Wave 3 was 15.0 years (SD = .86) and 51% of students were female. Results suggested that there was evidence of an overall program effect of the curriculum on amotivation regardless of fidelity of implementation. Compared to the control schools, all treatment school learners reported lower levels of amotivation in Wave 4 compared to Wave 3, as hypothesized. Using process evaluation data to monitor implementation fidelity, however, we also conclude that the school with better trained teachers who also reported higher levels of program fidelity had better outcomes than the other schools. We discuss the implications of linking process data with outcome data and associated methodological challenges in linking these data.