Adventure Tourism as a Research Tool in Non-Tourism Disciplines

Abstract

Tourism research can gain broader academic recognition if findings from tourism research become relevant to, and cited within, other academic disciplines. Adventure tourism can provide opportunities for ground breaking research on wide-ranging issues such as: motivations for human mobility; individual economic valuation of high-rarity, low-probability experiences; volunteer assumption of physical personal risk, and its legal consequences; positive and negative effects of tourism on conservation; psychological models of human emotions; the anthropology of interactions between highly disparate human cultures; the use of autoethnography as a research tool; construction of social capital and cohesion; altruistic or competitive behaviour under severe stress; the design of communications systems; establishment and operation of human relationships involving extreme personality types; the physiology of acute stress; and human perceptions of risk and emotion, the passage of time, and the purpose of life. Froman academic perspective, adventure tourism is much more than simply a substantial subsector of the mass tourism industry. It is an opportunity to conduct more widely relevant and recognized research, publishable in tourism journals yet also citeable in other disciplines.

Analysing adventure: a leisure lifepsychle?

“…For other individuals, however, these experiences are worth nothing, or less than nothing. This enormous difference between individuals, in value ascribed to the same experience, is very different to the standard economics of supply and demand, which assumes high substitutability in order to generate elasticity (Buckley 2014).…”

“…The valuation of adventure rewards also deserves more attention. Expert-level adventure involves long-term investment in training, practice and equipment, in order to gain a chance at what is often a very short peak experience (Buckley 2014). This implies that such peak experiences are valued very highly by the specific individuals concerned, perhaps thousands or in a few cases potentially millions of dollars per hour.…”

中国户外旅游回顾与展望——基于外国学者视角①

“…Indeed, given the very large scale and the rapid changes within China' s outdoor tourism, research within China is of global importance. These themes were reviewed recently for adventure tourism (Buckley, 2014), and for sustainable tourism more broadly (Buckley, 2011(Buckley, , 2012b. For China, I suggest five priority areas, as follows.…”

Adventure Thrills are Addictive

“…High-risk high-skill adventure recreation has been analyzed previously from the perspectives of commercial tourism products (Buckley, 2007 ); participant emotions and personalities (Faullant et al, 2011 ; Pomfret, 2011 ; Houge Mackenzie and Kerr, 2013 ), and participant motivations and experiences (Buckley, 2012 , 2014a , b , 2015 ). Behavioral addiction has been diagnosed and examined for addiction to exercise (Berczik et al, 2012 ; McNamara and McCabe, 2012 ; Lichtenstein et al, 2014 ), but not specifically for high-risk adventure activities.…”

“…The psychological significance of this is shown by the behavior of expert adventure tourists, who pay heavily for adventure tourism operators to take them to uncrowded sites with world-class conditions. Some adventure participants invest several hours every day over many years to achieve relevant skills, so that they may then be rewarded by very brief extreme experiences (Buckley, 2014b ): a single moment paid for by a lifetime of investment.…”