Women’s mountaineering: accessing participation benefits through constraint negotiation strategies

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate the strategies women use to negotiate mountaineering participation constraints and the resultant benefits from participation. Survey responses from 321 female mountaineers produced four constraint negotiation dimensions and three participation benefit dimensions using confirmatory factor analysis. Three of the four negotiation dimensions support earlier findings in the literature on women’s experiences of adventure activities. The identification of a fourth dimension relating to ‘confidence and adaptation’ represents a new contribution. Similarly, the three benefit dimensions largely support existing literature. However, some benefits loaded on different dimensions to what has previously been reported and verifying the influence of each negotiation dimension on specific benefit dimensions also represents an original contribution. Therefore, this study extends our understanding of female adventure participants and quantitatively verifies women’s constraint negotiation and participation benefits in the context of mountaineering. Accordingly, this study makes an important theoretical contribution to the understanding of women’s adventure experiences in mountaineering, which may be of interest to others researching female participation in other adventure activities. The findings also suggest that mountaineering is a space that is being used as a means to resist gendered expectations and to gain empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Constraint negotiation
• benefits
• women
• mountaineering
• adventure tourism
• adventure recreation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. Doran

Dr. A. Doran is a senior lecturer of tourism management in the Sheffield Business School. Adele previously was a snowboard instructor in America and is an enthusiast of the outdoors, which has inspired her area of research. Adele’s area of study is in the experiences of adventure tourists participating in organised adventure tourism, and she has published in this area. Specifically, her research investigates the constraints that can be encountered and negotiated when accessing and participating in adventure tourism, and the benefits that are sought and experienced from adventure holidays. Adele is a member of the Adventure Tourism Research Association (ATRA) and the Outdoor Recreation Research Group (ORRG) at Sheffield Hallam University.

P. Schofield

P. Schofield is Professor of Tourism and Services Management in Sheffield Business School. His research interests include consumer decision making and behaviour, place marketing and services management. Within these areas, his main foci of interest are place branding, destination image, and travel motivations and constraints. He is also interested in service quality and value, service failure recovery, compulsive purchasing and gambling behaviour. Peter was educated at New York and Manchester universities and worked as an operations manager for Pan Am at San Diego International Airport and at Manchester Airport in the UK before entering academia in 1987. He is a founder member of the International Academy of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, has published extensively in, and reviews for, a range of international journals and has supervised 18 PhD candidates through to completion. His research and consultancy income includes RCUK, Regional Development Agency and private sector funding, the findings from which have informed government, DMO and hotel management decision making.

T. Low

Dr. T. Low is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Marketing at Swansea University. Tiffany is an experienced researcher, with specialisations in luxury branding, ethical consumption practices, values constructs and sustainable tourism development. Her research focuses on the levels of consumer value placed on sustainable business practices in luxury hotels, and the influence this has on brand involvement and brand loyalty. Her research in this area has drawn on work in the fields of human geography, specifically mobilities of the super-rich, psychology, marketing and tourism. In addition to this, Tiffany’s research interests associated with sustainability have also resulted in her co-editing The Encyclopaedia of Sustainable Tourism (CABI, 2015) and continue her research in the field of adventure recreation and risk perceptions.