Introduction to theme issue on leisure and COVID-19

Although this theme issue is being published in 2023 and I completed my term as Editorin-Chief of the Journal of Leisure Research at the end of 2022, the papers in this theme issue were selected for publication in this issue before my term as editor was completed. Perhaps it is appropriate that the last issue for which I was responsible for as Editor-in-Chief is a theme issue on leisure and COVID-19 as my term as editor approximated the period during which the COVID-19 pandemic was prevalent. When I agreed to be editor I was expecting and eagerly looking forward to attending and meeting in-person with the Journal of Leisure Research Associate Editors at the 2020 and 2021 National Recreation and Park Association congresses as well as The Academy of Leisure Sciences conferences in 2021 and 2022. Due to the pandemic, I did not attend these conferences in person because they were online, or hybrid in the case of the 2021 NRPA Congress, and thus our editorial board meetings were online. It was only during the very end of my term as editor that I was able to attend an inperson meeting with a few of the Associate Editors at the 2022 National Recreation and Park Association Congress. While the Journal of Leisure Research has previously published a few empirical papers on leisure and COVID-19 (Harris et al., 2022; Rice et al., 2022), this theme issue is the first Journal of Leisure Research issue entirely devoted to empirical studies on leisure and COVID-19. During my time as editor, I have observed more and more submissions from authors outside of North America and an increasing number of authors whose first language is not English. This theme issue is a good example as authors of five of the eight papers in this issue are associated with institutions outside of North American and only two of the eight first authors are native English speakers. The first two papers in this theme issue are concerned with leisure and well-being during the COVID-19 period. In the first paper Bae and Chang (2023) explored how changes in stress, anxiety about COVID-19, and leisure participation influenced middle-aged South Koreans’ well-being during two peaks of the pandemic in 2020. They found that participants’ leisure participation shifted from home leisure to outdoor leisure between the two waves of the pandemic. Furthermore, they discovered that participating in more outdoor leisure activities contributed to higher levels of well-being. The second paper by AymerichFranch (2023) explored the influence of COVID-19 on emotional well-being and its relationship to habit and routine modifications for a sample of Spanish adults. Compared to before the pandemic, participants perceived a decrease in positive affect and an increase in negative affect during the pandemic. Participants reported an increase in the following activities: media and social media consumption, reading, talking or doing activities with other people in the home, eating and sleeping, cooking and baking, and home cleaning and tidying up. Increases in eating, media and social media consumption, and doing nothing were significantly associated with a decrease in positive affect and an increase in negative affect.