Families at leisure outdoors: well-being through adventure

ABSTRACT

This study investigates families who choose to co-participate in outdoor adventure holidays, and explores how they benefit from these shared experiences. In so doing, it seeks to determine the role of adventure tourism in developing and enhancing family well-being (FWB). Hyper-modern family life for many is powered by technological hardware, each room in the house replete with on-line pleasures, distractions and identities. In response to this dystopia, some families opt to take adventure holidays together. However, scholarship concerning collective experiences of adventurous leisure, in this case as families, is limited. Using a qualitative whole family approach, 15 (adventure tourist) families were interviewed, totalling 62 interviewees (29 adults and 33 children under 18 years old), in their home environments. Four key themes related to FWB emerged. First, families extended their active lifestyles to adventure holidays and repeatedly mentioned the health and fitness benefits gained from these experiences. Second, adventure holidays facilitated unmediated time together for families. Third, parents harboured ideals of positive personal development for their children in these adventure settings. Fourth, making memories during adventure holidays, and recollecting these post-trip, were integral to family bonding. Further research should consider non-traditional families, and various socio-economic and cultural groups in this context.

KEYWORDS:

• Families
• adventure tourism
• family well-being
• benefits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gill Pomfret

Gill Pomfret is senior lecturer in tourism at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). Her academic background is in Tourism Studies and she has researched and taught at UK universities since the 1990s. Her research focuses on consumer behaviour in tourism, primarily psychological aspects of adventure tourists. She has written a number of published journal articles and text book chapters on this subject. The key themes of these are: motives encouraging adventure tourism participation, experiences of adventure activities, benefits gained from participation, constraint negotiation journeys, and gender in adventure. Her current research concerns family groups of tourists and the role of adventure holidays in fostering family well-being and subjective well-being. She is also carrying out research on senior visitors to heritage attractions to understand their motives, constraints and on-site visitation experiences. Gill is a committee member of the Adventure Tourism Research Association (ATRA), and the Outdoor Recreation Research Group (ORRG) at Sheffield Hallam University.

Peter Varley

Peter Varley is professor of Rural Tourism and Consumer Studies at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, where he leads the multidisciplinary Nordic Place Research group. His sociologically-informed research centres upon investigations into tourist experiences, negotiated and accomplished via interaction with places and spaces, gastronomy, travel and outdoor leisure. Urban-rural contrasts are used to explore contemporary tensions such as slow/fast life, blurred leisure/work practices and place-based acts of post-structural consumer discourse and resistance. Liminal experiences, the ontological heaviness and lightness of life in wilder natural places and the mundaneness of outdoor practice are all recent subjects of interest.