Exploring efficacy in personal constraint negotiation: an ethnography of mountaineering tourists

Limited work has explored the relationship between efficacy and personal constraint negotiation for adventure tourists, yet efficacy is pivotal to successful activity participation as it influences people’s perceived ability to cope with constraints, and their decision to use negotiation strategies. This paper explores these themes with participants of a commercially organised mountaineering expedition. Phenomenology-based ethnography was adopted to appreciate the social and cultural mountaineering setting from an emic perspective. Ethnography is already being used to understand adventure participation, yet there is considerable scope to employ it further through researchers immersing themselves into the experience. The findings capture the interaction between the ethnographer and the group members, and provide an embodied account using their lived experiences. Findings reveal that personal mountaineering skills, personal fitness, altitude sickness and fatigue were the four key types of personal constraint. Self-efficacy, negotiation-efficacy and other factors, such as hardiness and motivation, influenced the effectiveness of negotiation strategies. Training, rest days, personal health, and positive self-talk were negotiation strategies. A conceptual model illustrates these results and demonstrates the interplay between efficacy and the personal constraint negotiation journey for led mountaineers

The benefits of residential fieldwork for school science : insights from a five-year initiative for inner-city students in the UK

International audienceThere is considerable international interest in the value of residential fieldwork for school students. In the UK, pressures on curriculum time, rising costs and heightened concern over students' safety are curtailing residential experiences. Collaboration between several key providers across the UK created an extensive programme of residential courses for 11-14 year olds in London schools from 2004-2008. Some 33,000 students from 849 schools took part. This paper draws on the evaluation of the programme that gathered questionnaire, interview and observational data from 2706 participating students, 70 teachers and 869 parents / carers from 46 schools mainly in deprived areas of the city. Our findings revealed that students' collaborative skills improved and interpersonal relationships were strengthened and taken back to school. Gains were strongest in social and affective domains; behavioural improvements occurred for some students. Individual cognitive gains were revealed more convincingly during face-to-face interviews than through survey items. Students from socially deprived backgrounds benefitted from exposure to learning environments which promoted authentic practical inquiry. Over the five year programme, combined physical adventure and real-world experiences proved to be popular with students and their teachers. Opportunities for learning and doing science in ways not often accessible in urban school environments were opened up. Further programmes, building upon the provision of mixed curriculum-adventure course design, have been implemented across the UK as a result of the London experience. The popularity and apparent success of these combination courses suggest that providers need to consider the value of developing similar programmes in the future

Taking an Extended Embodied Perspective of Touch: Connection-Disconnection in iVR

Bringing touch into VR experiences through haptics is considered increasingly important for user engagement and fostering feelings of presence and immersion, yet few qualitative studies have explored users' iVR touch experiences. This paper takes an embodied approach–bringing attention to the tactile-kinaesthetic body–to explore users' wholistic experiences of touch in iVR, moving beyond the cutaneous and tactile elements of “feeling” to elaborate upon themes of movement and kinetics. Our findings show how both touch connections and disconnections emerged though material forms of tactility (the controller, body positioning, tactile expectations) and through “felt proximities” and the tactile-kinaesthetic experience thus shaping the sense of presence. The analysis shows three key factors that influence connection and disconnection, and how connection is re-navigated or sought at moments of experienced disconnection: a sense of control or agency; identity; and bridging between the material and virtual. This extended notion of touch deepens our understanding of its role in feelings of presence by providing insight into a range of factors related to notions of touch – both physical and virtual–that come into play in creating a sense of connection or presence (e.g., histories, expectations), and highlights the potential for iVR interaction to attend to the body beyond the hands in terms of touch

User Experience of Virtual Reality-Based Digital Sports: A Topic Modeling Approach

Digital technologies have been found to transform our society. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people have started their usage of digital sports. However, little research has provided a deep understanding of the user experience of digital sports at the individual participant level. To address the research gap, this study explores how virtual reality (VR)-based digital sports satisfy users’ innate needs based on the psychological needs of humans and self-determination theory. By conducting a topic modeling with 11,676 tweets generated by VR-based digital golf participation users from Twitter, we identified some elements within VR-based digital golf to explain how VR-based digital golf satisfies participation users’ three psychological needs, including the need of autonomy, the need of relatedness, and the need of competence

Recreation, tourism and nature in a changing world : proceedings of the fifth international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas : Wageningen, the Netherlands, May 30-June 3, 2010

Proceedings of the fifth international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas : Wageningen, the Netherlands, May 30-June 3, 201

Learning in, through and about movement - Teaching research methods and research skills, engaging the imagination to develop creative and reflective thinkers.

This paper has evolved out of a much larger doctoral thesis. It explores firstly the value of placing the learner at the heart of their own learning. Secondly, it examines as a means of trying to do something different when exploring innovative practice, the concept of learning in, through and about movement, in order to teach undergraduates about research methods, research skills and notions of fair testing, and repeatability in a practical environment outside the traditional classroom. The idea explored is that through movement, students would creatively find solutions to the open-ended problems that were set, and then reflect on their own and others learning. Key Words: Movement, Learner Voice, Research Methods, Research Skill

Balance ninja: towards the design of digital vertigo games via galvanic vestibular stimulation

Vertigo – the momentary disruption of the stability of perception – is an intriguing game element that underlies many unique play experiences, such as spinning in circles as children to rock climbing as adults, yet vertigo is relatively unexplored when it comes to digital play. In this paper we explore the potential of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) as a game design tool for digital vertigo games. We detail the design and evaluation of a novel two player GVS game, Balance Ninja. From study observations and analysis of Balance Ninja (N=20), we present three design themes and six design strategies that can be used to aid game designers of future digital vertigo games. With this work we aim to highlight that vertigo can be a valuable digital game element that helps to expand the range of games we play