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The purpose of this study threefold: to determine whether a shared cultural model of the importance of a set of leisure activities to a good leisure life existed in urban Taiwan, the degree to which cultural consonance in leisure mediates the relationship between leisure constraints and leisure satisfaction, and the degree to which leisure satisfaction affects life satisfaction and self-rated health. Results indicate that a cultural model of the importance of leisure activities to a good leisure life existed among sample members. Second, higher levels of self-reported participation in leisure activities that are culturally agreed upon as more important for a good leisure life are more strongly associated with leisure satisfaction than are activities culturally agreed upon as less important. Finally, leisure satisfaction strongly predicts both life satisfaction and self-rated health.Health and wellbeing have long been important concerns for recreation and leisure researchers and practitioners. In research, however, these have usually been examined in relation to activities presumed to be freely chosen by individuals. Freedom of choice is often regarded as an essential attribute of leisure while the degree to which culture both affords and inhibits leisure participation has been considered infrequently (Chick & Dong, 2005). Additionally, research that involves culture has typically treated it as an implicit independent variable. That is, samples of individuals from two or more cultures are compared in terms of other variables, and culture itself is not measured in any way. For example, Florian and Har-Even (1984) compared leisure activity choice among Jewish and Arab youth in Israel, and Walker, Jackson, and Deng (2007) compared perceptions of leisure constraints among Canadian and Mainland Chinese university students. Observed differences were attributed to difference in culture. The ideas that there are agreed-upon cultural models of leisure, that individuals vary in their behavior with respect to them, and that their degree of adherence to those models affects satisfaction or other variables have received even less attention. However, two innovations in anthropology, cultural consensus theory and cultural consonance theory, each with related analytic techniques, have made such research possible.

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