Browsing by Author "Närvänen, Riikka"

Today’s adolescents have challenges in various areas of wellbeing, as physical activity, anxiety and other mental health disorders, academic stress and feelings of loneliness. Covid19-pandemic has yet reinforced many of these problems. At the same time, nature has several health- and wellbeing effects on many of the issues above and the positive outcomes can be strengthened with the methods of outdoor expeditions. In this study, it is going to be examined, what kind of wellbeing effects and changes in the relation to nature are experienced in Lahti based 9th grade pupils after a 3-day hike in Repovesi National Park in Finland. This study took place in May 2022 as a part of NATUREWELL-research project. The participants (N = 16) were interviewed in small groups after the hike and this data was analyzed with qualitative content analysis. The results show that the participants recovered from everyday stress, the social interaction between the classmates and the group spirit got better and the participants noticed their will to spend more time in nature, even though their hectic everyday lives sometimes make that challenging. Additionally, spending time in primitive environment gave participants perspective on how effortless their everyday life is. They noticed that in natural environment it was easier to be themselves around others. Also, pupils learned new skills and got courage to go spend time in the nature and go hiking and camping again in the future. The results are in line with earlier research about wellbeing effects of nature and outdoor expeditions and they support that spending time in nature and in a 3-day hike can have short-term wellbeing effects on adolescents. In the future the challenge is to find out, how this kind of interventions can be utilized wider among adolescents.