Browsing by Author "Tolonen, Tiina"

Objectives: Hobbies are thought to only reduce stress but this is not necessarily the case for every hobby. For example LARPing is meaningful for its participants and it gives new experiences, but it also has demands that can cause stress. The aim of this Master's Thesis is to study using recently developed questionnaire what elements cause stress in LARPing and are they connected to experienced stress in LARP. Based on the personal experiences and research, the authors of the questionnaire assumed that larp stress would be mostly explained by 12 different factors. The factors were either time-related or related to other features such as performance and living up to expectations, living up to social demands, feelings of being excluded, harassment and insecurity, emotional strain, poor practical arrangements or low hype before the LARP. Methods: The stress related to LARPing was studied with a new survey that mapped experienced stress, possible causes of stress, coping stretegies and background information. 62.3% of the respondents of this online survey were females, 22.5% males and 9.0% non-binary. Factor analysis was conducted to variables measuring causes of stress to see if the 12 hypothesised factors emerged. To test the validity of the questionnaire in measuring LARP-related stress, the relationship between the founded factors and experienced stress in LARP was examined by a one-way regression analysis. Results and conclusions: Causes of LARP stress were in part in agreement with the hypotheses. Stress about being part of the group, performance, practical arrangements and harassment were consistent with the hypothesis. However, also unexpected factors emerged, such as stress about memoryload, having a meaningless role, quality of the props, bleed, low hype, lack of fun and insecurity. One factor could not be interpreted adequately. These factors explaned 62.84% of the variance. Of the 12 factors only being part of the group (explained variance 34.59%), quality of props (explained variance 1.57%) and the unknown factor (explained variance 1.50%) were validated by being associated with experienced total LARP stress. Being part of the group seems to be relevant cause of stress in LARPing wich is understandable considering the communal nature of LARPing. This information could be taken into a consideration when organizing LARPs. Increased sense of community could support the well-being of players in LARPing.