A Tri-Method Approach to a Review of Adventure Tourism Literature: Bibliometric Analysis, Content Analysis, and a Quantitative Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This article provides an objective, systematic, and integrated review of the Western academic literature on adventure tourism to discover the theoretical foundations and key themes underlying the field by combining three complementary approaches of bibliometric analysis, content analysis, and a quantitative systematic review. A total of 114 publications on adventure tourism were identified that revealed three broad areas of foci with adventure tourism research: (1) adventure tourism experience, (2) destination planning and development, and (3) adventure tourism operators. Adventure tourism has an intellectual tradition from multiple disciplines, such as the social psychology of sport and recreation. There is an underrepresentation of studies examining non-Western tourists in their own geographic contexts or non-Western tourists in Western geographic contexts. Our findings pave ways for developing a more robust framework and holistic understanding of the adventure tourism field.

Cultural and Natural Resources in Tourism Island: Bibliometric Mapping

“…These results are coincident with bibliometric analyzes performed in different types of tourism; creative tourism [119], active tourism [120], adventure tourism [121], community-based tourism [122]; wine tourism [123], rural tourism [124], all these types of tourism depend on cultural and natural resources. Because they are specific types of tourism, the interest of researchers is lower than when tourism in general is investigated.…”

Sharing economy: A review and agenda for future research

“…content analysis) tool that has gained prominence in the academic community (Biesenthal and Wilden, 2014), more recently in tourism and hospitality (Cheng et al, 2016). It interprets and visualizes complex text data by transforming "lexical co-occurrence information from natural language into semantic patterns in an unsupervised manner" through "two stages of extraction − semantic and relational" (Smith and Humphreys, 2006, p. 262).…”

The Interrelationship between Personality Traits and Psychological Constraints on Adventure Activity Participation

“…Furthermore, adventure activities require involvement, skills and performance (Cheng et al, 2016;Pomfret, 2006) and to experience a "rush" has lately been identified as key (Buckley, 2012). The thrill is the active participation by the consumer in naturalistic activity (Arnould, 2007) which leads to the feelings of sensation and flow (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990;Csíkszentmihályi & Rathunde, 1993) that are often sought in these experiences.…”

“…The representation of people as adventure seekers has become commonplace. Due to the increased attention to adventure activity (Pomfret & Bramwell, 2014), the potential for the development of experiences based on such activities has aroused increasing interest (Cheng, Edwards, Darcy, & Redfern, 2016). Since participation in adventurous activities often requires great effort and commitment, participation might not appeal to, or be attainable by everyone.…”