Abstract:

Outdoor leisure activities are one of often ways to experience leisure. In our research we investigated the relationship between these activities and specific values which seems to be influenced by them. Therefore, the first aim of our article is to show and analyze the relationship between outdoor activities and value preferences. The second aim is to show the impact of these relationships on education and personal development. We suppose this relationship could be used as the starting point for creating specific educational programs to help with values development. We have collected data from 5425 respondents aged 15 and over using a questionnaire. The leisure activities were collected using the Catalogue of Leisure Activities. As we focused on personal development we used the competence and moral values for the research, both mainly coming from the Rokeach´s itinerary of instrumental values. The values preferences were measured separately for men and women due to statistical differences. We analyzed the dependencies statistically using the one-way ANOVA. Research has shown a statistically significant relationship between outdoor activities and instrumental values also the differences in this relationship between men and women. The impact of outdoor activities on moral instrumental values is higher among women (i. e. values loving and broadminded). On the contrary, the impact of outdoor activities on competence instrumental values is higher among men (i. e. values self-controlled, independent, intellectual). The discovered dependences between values, outdoor activities and gender allows us to start a discussion concerning their impact on personal development and growth. Several authors have shown there exists a supportive role of outdoor activities on specific skills and behavior. We discovered the impact is deeper and reached the personal preferences of values. The last question we discuss is, how to use this transitive relationship in education and build educational and social courses, especially for young men and women, which will help to develop specific values.

Keywords:

Outdoor, leisure, values, personal development, education.