How Good is the Evidence that Outdoor Adventure Activities are Beneficial?

It is very difficult, though not impossible , to find a research publication or report that concludes outdoor adventure activities are not beneficial to skill acquisition, health and wellbeing. Qualitative evidence is invariably positive, even if the participant admits that the learning experience revealed certain weaknesses. Quantitative measures of benefit have been reviewed in meta-analyses and can be shown to be comparable with benefits from other educational and psychological interventions. Despite this, there has been much concern in the outdoor adventure research community about the quality of its quantitative research, so much so that in the 1990s researchers seemed to feel that they had gone as far as they could in trying to quantify the benefits of outdoor adventure and advocated placing greater emphasis on qualitative methods. The problems for quantitative research reside primarily in the suitability of the measuring instrument, the recruitment of the sample and the treatment of variables. All of these relate to the unusual richness of the experiential learning environment that outdoor adventure provides, with natural, physical and social dimensions integrated into the one experience. In this respect, the power of outdoor adventure to deliver personal and social benefit is also the source of our problems in researching it.