An Empirical Look at Walsh and Golins' Adventure Education Process Model: Relationships Between Antecedent Factors, Perceptions of Characteristics of an Adventure Education Experience, And Changes in Self-Efficacy‪.‬

Adventure-based and outdoor experiential programs remain popular for recreational, developmental, and therapeutic uses. Adventure based programs are used in schools, community programs, camps, and corporate settings around the globe. The abundance of affirmative research and evaluation findings supports the notion that these programs have the potential to enact change in participants and groups among a variety of populations and a number of environmental settings (e.g., Hattie, Marsh, Neill, & Richards, 1997; Hans, 2000; Cason & Gillis, 1994). While the preponderance of positive research findings indicates that development (e.g., increases in self-esteem, self-efficacy, trust, group cohesion) through adventure based programs is possible, how and why this development occurs remains less clear. Given the breadth of adventure applications, and the abundance of outcome-based research, it is critical to the continued success of the field that closer examination is afforded to the process behind adventure education and to the identification of specific programmatic and design components that are most critical to fostering developmental outcomes. While many have called for such research (Ewert, 1989; Hanna, 1992; Hattie, et al., 1997; Henderson & Fox, 1994; Kelley, Goursey, & Selby, 1997; Klint, 1999; Scheri 1990; Warner, 1999), few quality studies are available to guide practice, and programming decisions remain largely an enigmatic process based on gut instinct, past experience, and borrowed or untested philosophical understanding or belief.