This study examines the effects of outdoor developmental adventure programming (ODA) on college students’ self-esteem. Although some previous studies have shown that outdoor adventure programming has positive effects on self-esteem, others did not find any effect. A quasi-experimental study was conducted over 5 months, which included two pretests and two posttests to address some limitations of previous studies. A total of 84 participants completed the Questionnaire d’estime de soi hiérarchique, a questionnaire assessing self-esteem on four occasions. The experimental group (outdoor adventure; n = 32) was compared with the control groups (travel, n = 17; soccer, n = 35) using repeated measures of covariance analyses. Positive and significant increases were found for the athletic dimension of self-esteem and for global self-esteem for the experimental group (outdoor adventure) only. The increased benefits provided by the combination of adventure and sports in ODA, over sports-only or traveling-only interventions, underline the importance of developing ODA with college students.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.