Understanding Action and Adventure Sports Participation—An Ecological Dynamics Perspective

Participant rates in action and adventure sports (AAS) are on the rise, surpassing many traditional sports in popularity [1, 2]. In this opinion piece, the term AAS refers to a variety of sports such as snowboarding, surfing, parkour, climbing and BASE jumping.

It could be argued that past research has tended to overemphasize a risk-taking perspective when discussing participation in AAS. This has imposed a superficial lens on participation, viewed as fundamentally influenced by processes underpinned by risk-taking, promoting a biased perspective where AAS are perceived as a context for taking socially unacceptable, pathological and unnecessary risks [3–10]. To exemplify, classic theoretical approaches proposed to explain behavior in AAS include sensation seeking [11, 12], edgework [13, 14], type ‘T’ personality [4] and psychoanalysis [15]. The main narrative of these approaches is that personality traits and socialization processes predispose individuals to participate in risky or life-threatening activities [16].

The overemphasized focus on risk has meant that other important aspects of participation have been widely overlooked [17–19]. The most significant limitation with ‘risk-centric’ approaches is that fundamentally, the activity may be defined as pathological and unhealthy. Most theoretical explanations assume that participation reflects a desire for thrills, excitement or adrenaline-seeking. However, emerging research indicates that these explanations are an oversimplification [18, 20, 21] and do not reflect the lived experience of participants who refute the thrills and adrenaline notion and instead describe AAS participation as meaningful and life-enhancing [16, 18, 19]. In recent years, a growing body of literature supports the idea that participation can promote psychological and physical well-being and health [18, 21–24] in a variety of ways. Research has recently linked even the most extreme forms of AAS to varied physical and psychological health and well-being outcomes. In summary, activities generally provide benefits, such as (1) opportunities to fulfill basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness [16], (2) opportunities to overcome challenge [25], (3) opportunities to experience intense emotions [26], (4) increased positive psychological outcomes such as resilience, self-efficacy and positive affect [21, 22, 27], (5) increased physical activity levels [16, 28] and (6) feelings of connection to nature [17, 29, 30]. These benefits are often overlooked as modern societies are increasingly focused on providing ‘safe’ behavioural environments which reduce physical risks for members [16, 31].

One possible explanation for the discrepancies in popular imagination and theoretical explanations in research on AAS participation is that conceptual definitions for these activities remain unclear. Common terms include action sports [32, 33], adventure sports [25, 34, 35], extreme sports [36, 37], lifestyle sports [38–40], alternative sports [41, 42] and (high) risk sports [43–46]. This is a key concern because the lack of widely shared definitions or classifications among researchers has led to confusing discourse and contradictory research findings.

Here, we summarize the lack of clarity of the past research into five main issues: (1) activities requiring high level of self-knowledge, personal skills, training, commitment, environmental knowledge and task knowledge, such as BASE jumping or big-mountain skiing, are assumed to be in the same category as activities that require no previous experience or knowledge of the activity or environment, such as commercial white-water rafting or bungee jumping [39]. Findings from studies on motivations, for instance, in activities such as commercial rafting, may not generalize to understanding participation in activities such as BASE jumping. (2) Research has identified various motives for participation, such as connection with nature [17, 47], relieving boredom [25], pushing personal boundaries and overcoming fear [18, 20], social relationships [25], pleasurable kinesthetic bodily sensations [47], control, mastery and skill [20] and goal achievement [19]. These findings indicate that the spectrum of motives is wide and dependent on the form of activity. (3) Sports differ in terms of activity duration and intensity leading to different interaction effects on behaviour. For example, a mountaineering trip might take weeks, exposing the individual to prolonged periods of environmental uncertainty, whereas other sports, such as BASE jumping, might only take seconds. (4) Another finding, questioning the idea that AAS are synonymous with youth sports or sub-cultures, is that participants represent a broad demographic, including males and females of various age ranges and education and income levels [48]. (5) Also, each sport has its own unique history and development patterns [39]. Many are still evolving and fragmenting. For example, snowboarding can take place in urban environments, formerly the home of skateboarding. At the same time, boundaries between sports are becoming more dynamic, for example with snowboarding also being undertaken at high altitude where conventional snowboarding skills are combined with mountaineering techniques. One potential pitfall in categorizing a specific sport, or a group of sports as a single entity (i.e. as ‘extreme’), could be that distinguishing characteristics of different participation styles and the role of the interactions between individual characteristics of participants and varying performance environments are overlooked.

The term ‘sport’ is often viewed as synonymous with structured competition. However, from an etymological perspective, the English word ‘sport’, derived from old French word ‘desport’, originally refers to a ‘pastime’ [49]. Also, for example the Finnish equivalent ‘urheilu’ is derived from ‘urhea’, referring to the adjectives ‘brave’ or ‘valiant’ and can be defined as an activity to maintain physical fitness, recreation or as a competition according to specific rules [50]. Here, we adopt the broad definition including the dimensions of self-development and recreation. Specifically, sports are considered to be multi-faceted, boundary-crossing activities [51], which do not necessarily involve structured competitive activity, regulated performance environments, rules or institutions.

Understanding these nuances in definition is crucial for recognizing how a variety of sociocultural values have constrained emerging participation styles. Consequently, it is imperative that we develop a clear understanding of what exactly constitutes an AAS. The confusion in current discourse indicates an evident need for a more nuanced, holistic and multidisciplinary approach to the study of AAS [34]. Thus, AAS should be understood through emphasizing a different level of analysis to traditional perspectives.

In this paper, we argue that a more comprehensive understanding of AAS participation can be achieved through the ecological dynamics (ED) framework. This framework promotes an understanding, over relevant timescales (such as performance and learning), of how irregular and unpredictable constraints in AAS influence the emergent dynamics of continuous, dynamical relationships evolving between an individual and her/his environment [34, 52]. The cornerstones of ED are that (a) movement behaviors are examined and understood at the performer-environment scale of analysis; (b) perception of information provides opportunities for action (i.e., affordances) and is the basis of how behaviours are regulated at an individual level; and (3) performance behaviours are self-organized over time under interacting constraints [34, 52, 53]. We discuss how these performance characteristics compose a wide variety of participation styles, shaped by key constraints which effectively support the innovative actions of participants and are linked to individuals’ cognitions, actions and perceptions of diverse physical and sociocultural performance environments [34, 52].

The ecological dynamics framework provides a rich multidisciplinary platform for comprehensive and nuanced understanding of participation and creative actions of AAS participants, which emerge in all kinds of imaginable and ever-changing environments. Instead of trying to determine the ‘traditional ethos’ of each sport or categorizing (sub)disciplines, we have argued that deeper understanding can be gained by considering participation as emergent and acknowledging that performer-environment relationships are shaped by dynamic interacting constraints that distinguish a niche, or a form of life in AAS.

Thus, researchers and practitioners should refine a nuanced understanding and consider a sociocultural focus on affordances to appraise these characteristics and constraints within and across AAS. This is important when choosing research methods or pedagogical approaches or when designing learning environments. A fundamental consideration in the study of AAS is that rather than being predetermined, affordances emerge from a dynamic form of life in a sociocultural context. Practical examples of the historical development patterns of many AAS suggest that it would be most useful for future research to clarify the exploration of affordances outside of particular ecological niches or ‘discipline-typical’ environments (physical and sociocultural). In terms of originality, more attention is needed to understand possibilities potentially provided by interactions between activity categories or ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ interactions, including becoming attuned to affordances via new technologies and emerging online performance demonstration sub-arenas in social media. To better understand the link between affordances and creativity in any AAS, more empirical research needs to be conducted from an ecological, multidisciplinary perspective and directed towards the use of introspective and qualitative methods.