The effects of urban inhabitants’ nearby outdoor recreation on their well-being and their psychological resilience

Abstract

With the shift to a service based society, providing opportunities for outdoor recreation that enables mental and physiological self-regulation has become an increasingly important landscape function. Recent research has provided considerable evidence that visits to near-natural everyday landscapes promote psychological and physical health. However, little is so far known about the effects of people’s regular outdoor recreation in their local natural environment on their well-being and, in particular, on their psychological resilience. In our project we address this research gap by investigating nearby outdoor recreation behaviour in three urbanized regions in Switzerland, each of which has a different predominant culture and language (German, French and Italian speaking). A standardized questionnaire was sent to a random sample of residents (N=1200) in each region. Stepwise regression supported the hypothesis that regular nearby outdoor recreation has a significant but rather marginal effect on respondents’ reported well-being and their psychological resilience, even when systematically controlled. However, similar effect sizes, in particular in terms of psychological resilience, were found with other leisure activities. More generally, we found that well-being and psychological resilience were influenced by different factors, and that increasing psychological resilience mainly required a long duration of recreation or leisure activities. Management implicationsThis paper provides robust evidence that urban inhabitants’ regular outdoor recreation in the nearby natural environment has positive effects on their emotional well-being and their psychological resilience. The findings suggest that the quality of the nearby recreation area is at least an as important condition for these benefits as the easy access to these areas. Inhabitants’ satisfaction with the recreation area, their activity level within the recreation areas as well as the time spent in the recreation areas appeared to be more relevant predictors for these benefits than the frequency of visits in these areas. Accordingly, managers should invest as much resources in increasing the quality of the recreation areas as in improving their accessibility.