THRILL SEEKING VACATIONS - A LIFE-SPAN PERSPECTIVE

Recently, much attention has been given to participation in high risk sport and recreation activities. Psychologists attribute participation to innate personality traits and sociologists suggest that social str ucture is influential. This paper adopts a life span perspective to in vestigate patterns of preference for a leisure-based tourist role call ed the Thrill Seeker. A purposive sample of 1277 New England (USA) res idents were surveyed; 124 males and 107 females report taking thrill s eeking vacations. Crosstabulations were employed to identify patterns of preference for the Thrill Seeker role for men and women over the li fe course. Stepwise discriminant function analysis was used to develop profiles of male and female thrill seekers. The results suggest that preference for the Thrill Seeker role peaks for men and women in Early Adulthood and declines thereafter. The findings are discussed within the context of Levinson et al. (1978) model of the adult life course.