A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Campus Recreation as Identity Work

Campus recreation research has generated important insight into participation patterns, constraints, service quality, belonging, retention, and student success outcomes. This conceptual paper argues that campus recreation should also be understood as a site of identity work. Drawing from symbolic interactionist and identity theory perspectives, leisure scholarship on identity development in emerging adulthood, and campus recreation research on belonging, comfort, inclusion, and student perceptions, the paper develops a framework for understanding how students negotiate campus recreation in relation to self-concept, social recognition, and possible selves. Five identity work processes are proposed, including identity verification, identity threat, identity experimentation, identity positioning through others, and identity through action. The framework suggests that participation, nonparticipation, and selective engagement are shaped not only by access, motivation, or constraints, but also by how students interpret recreation environments as settings that verify valued identities, threaten them, make possible selves imaginable, and appear socially navigable for enactment.