Managing youth leisure mass gatherings: A coordinated service response for ‘Safer Schoolies’

ABSTRACT

Mass gatherings are a public health challenge because of crowdedness and associated health risks. ‘Schoolies’ is the largest youth leisure mass gathering in Australia. We examine a coordinated service response called ‘Safer Schoolies’, which aims to manage risks and optimise health and wellbeing for Schoolies attendees and the surrounding community. We examine ‘Safer Schoolies’ in a leisure context from a social identity theory-informed perspective; describe the coordinated service response; demonstrate a practical model of data collection, measurement and baselining; and report trends from a survey-based research programme with five annual cohorts of young people who attended Schoolies (N = 1,588). Findings show attendees have strong levels of trust in, and feel highly identified with, their friends at Schoolies, with low psychological distress on average. Service perceptions and help-seeking intentions improved over time, with cohorts increasingly considering service providers to be safe and viable sources of support. As societies continue to open up following COVID-19 restrictions, these insights can inform targeted surveillance and coordinated management of leisure pursuits in youth mass gathering settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure experience
• young people
• psychological distress
• crowd psychology
• social identity

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank Taylor Alati, Sarah Blessing, Joey Brautigam, Thomas Curro, Samuel Fouhy, Petra Harman-Schufft, Sienna Hinton, Yasmin Larasati, Jenna Laroque, Harrison Lee, Sarah Macinnes, Thomas McCarthy, Joseph Martin, Daniel Raab, Younji Ryu, Joshua Santin, Martina Vuckavac, Zoe Weller, Nick Wheeler, Olivia Zeckovic, Lara Ollis, Bhargav Dave, Brittany Chapman, Cassandra Alford, Gabrielle Chatwood, Jessica Gralton, Pratima Kavi, and Yanzhuo Yu for their assistance with field data collection. We also thank Helena Radke, Charlie Crimston, Zoe Walter, Alexander Saeri and Elyse Williams for their contributions to earlier phases of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2022.2143877

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded with support from an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE160100592, TC), the Australian National University Futures Scheme grant (TC and MS), and a National Health and Medical Research Council Emerging Leadership Fellowship (APP1173270, TC). The authors also thank Safer Schoolies, Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government, for their support

Notes on contributors

Laura J. Ferris

Laura J. Ferris is a Lecturer and Clinical Psychologist at the University of Queensland. Laura has expertise in social identity, mass gatherings, shared affective experiences, health, and wellbeing.

Tegan Cruwys

Tegan Cruwys is an Associate Professor, National Health Medical Research Council Emerging Leadership Fellow and Clinical Psychologist at the Australian National University. Tegan has expertise in social identity, mental health, and health risk behaviour.

Joanne A. Rathbone

Joanne A. Rathbone is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University. Joanne has expertise in social identity, stigma, and health.

Mark Stevens

Mark Stevens is a Lecturer at the Australian National University. Mark has expertise in social psychology, sport and exercise psychology, and health psychology.

Yawei Jiang

Yawei Jiang is a Lecturer in the Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Her research interests include tourism crisis and disaster management, organisational and employee resilience, dynamic capabilities, stakeholder collaboration, and strategic management.