The effect of adventure on resilience: the importance of gender and personality.

Resilience, is the capability to deal with and adapt to stress or adverse circumstances. This study looks at the development of resilience in males and females through the participation in a week-long adventure experience. Participants completed Wagnild and Young’s (1993) resilience scale, as well as the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) (Connor & Davidson, 2003) on four occasions. They also completed a personality trait inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) in the initial data collection. These qualitative resilience measures were used pre and post the intervention to assess the resilience levels of 32 university students who were all in their first year of studying outdoor and adventure education. The main finding indicated that there was no difference in the resilience levels of males and females. Similarly, there was no change in resilience because of the adventure intervention. However, despite the results not being significant, different patterns do emerge between the genders over time. Results also show that there were some strong associations between personality traits and resilience. Implications of this study are that trying to change the levels of resilience in people who are already moderately or highly resilient is ineffective