Systems for choosing a hobby
What methods do we follow?
How starting from scratch, can we decide on a hobby among the many that exist? How to know that it is right?
There are several methods:
An excellent way to choose a hobby is to find out about those that relatives, friends or acquaintances have and ask and find out what they consist of and how they are done.
Another excellent way to choose it is to face a list of hobbies and deduce which one is believed to be the most convenient, as indicated on various pages. A description of each can be tiresome and vague. There is also the problem that many people are indecisive and do not know their abilities well when faced with new situations. It is moderately essential not to choose, as far as possible, a hobby for which you do not have any of the required aptitudes.
In theory, the most logical thing would be to make a prior choice through a test that assesses our interests and abilities:
Hobby choice tests: general concepts.
In the beginning, two critical choices in life were pointed out: choosing a career and choosing a partner. Various concordance tests have been developed for cases with doubts, some with a scientific basis and others purely empirical or speculative. You answer the questions of one of these tests. Ultimately, they tell you which is the most suitable career for you, according to your personality and desires and what may be your most suitable partner type. They even propose specific partners. This way of predicting what suits you (a modern oracle) could be applied to any choice: where I go on vacation, what dress I buy for that wedding, what school I send my child to, etc.
And-we have already arrived-also when choosing a hobby. There are several straightforward tests to determine a hobby, but they seem ambiguous and help little. Therefore, it would be interesting to choose a hobby to have a relatively reliable, solid test similar to those scientifically studied for predicting job or career choice, such as the well-known Strong Inventory, among others. A test’s development is very complex, as demonstrated by Strong’s trial and other similar ones. But, considering that a hobby is something important but not fundamental, like a career, it is tolerable that the test has a margin of error since it is not scientifically proven.
Development of a test: difficulties.
The development of the test poses several problems, and not the least is the ability to discriminate between very similar hobbies. It must be taken into account that many hobbies are very similar in many aspects, such as handicrafts, model making or ceramics, without it being easy to point out in the test which is the differentiating elements. These three hobbies require manual skills and an interest in handling objects and are unrelated to physical activity or the outdoors. On the other hand, it seems very clear that assembling model aeroplanes or tanks has nothing to do with knitting a sweater or embroidering a handkerchief. These, in turn, are not very similar to making an oven-painted clay jug. With these few differences, it is tough for any test to be correct, except that it assesses the declared interest of the subject in one of the activities, this being the main decision-making element. Ideally, once the test has been developed and its internal validity verified as far as possible, it would be to test its validity with the test-retest system or by comparing it with a population with already defined hobbies. It is a complicated organisational issue but of great interest. We, encountering such difficulties, have preferred to propose a simple choice system based on an algorithm according to the main characteristics of each group of hobbies.
Summary:
The choice of a hobby, or several, is quite essential, and there is no system with a serious, documented, scientific basis to do it. It must be based on recommendations from known people or sources such as the internet, books and magazines, taking into account the wishes and abilities of the interested party. There are simple tests without an adequate basis, and it could be interesting to have some more complete and well-founded ones.
