Negotiating adventure recreation: How women can access satisfying adventure experiences throughout their lives.

Since the mid 1980's, research on women's leisure has attempted to measure and describe the extent to which females leisure participation is constrain ed and the forms these constraints take. More recently, research has begun to focus on the ways individuals negotiate these limitations. This paper re ports on research which builds on these latter studies by describing and di scussing women's experiences of adventure recreation from the perspective o f the participants. Forty-two women were interviewed and several methods of negotiating adventure were identified as the women balanced their life pri orities and sought satisfaction in changing circumstances. The methods iden tified included prioritizing, seeking compromises, becoming self-aware, bei ng positive, networking and anticipation. Not all methods were equally sati sfying, and negotiation strategies to access and exit adventure made up a p ool of techniques the women adopted to manage constraints and/or create adv enture opportunities.