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. From an 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.