Robert A. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in sociology in 1964 from the University of Minnesota. He has taught at Presbyterian College (1964-65), Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland (1965-73), the Univ. of Texas at Arlington (1973-76), and the Univ. of Calgary (1976-1999).

In 2000 he was appointed Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary. Stebbins served as President of the Social Science Federation of Canada (1991-1992), after having served as President of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (1988-1989). Stebbins' principal contribution to the field of leisure studies is his "serious leisure perspective." It revolves around a typology of leisure, based on the ways people experience and are motivated to pursue particular free-time activities. From concatenated qualitative/exploratory research on 21 different amateur, hobbyist, and volunteer activities, he inductively generated over a period of 32 years the aforementioned perspective. Today its three forms - serious, casual, and project-based leisure - along with their many types and subtypes, constitute a main orientation for research and analysis in this interdisciplinary field. In recognition of this contribution Stebbins was elected Fellow of the Academy of Leisure Sciences (1997), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1999), and Senior fellow in the World Leisure Academy (2010). Many of his 60 books center on one aspect or another of serious, casual, and project-based leisure.

Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time (Transaction, 2007) has been the standard reference, though it is now being upstaged by his own The Serious Leisure Perspective: A Synthesis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).