High-risk sports - identifying incentives instead of motives

High-risk sports (HRS), encompassing outdoor sports like climbing, surfing, or skydiving, have become increasingly popular. As an inherent part of these activities, there is the danger of serious injury or even death when something goes wrong. Sports psychology research explores the underlying motivation to understand and explain the behavior of persons engaging in such activities. Motivated behavior results from the interaction of person-related motives and the incentives a given situation offers (Rheinberg, 2012). According to several quantitative studies, different HRS satisfy different motives; e.g. sensation seeking is linked to skydiving, whereas emotion regulation and agency dominate mountaineering (Barlow et. al., 2013). Furthermore, recent qualitative studies showed a range of diverse motives like freedom, challenge, or nature across various high-risk sports (Frühauf et al., 2022), revealing ambiguous findings. However, there are few studies investigating the incentives of different HRS (Beier, 2001, Venetz, 2012), so the situational factor appears to have been neglected so far. As a result, this research project aims to investigate the incentives in different high-risk sports that typically take place in a natural environment, such as on land, in the air, or on water (Cohen et al., 2018; Pomfret, 2006). Determined by the interaction of the task and the environment (Immonen et al., 2018), HRS like mountaineering, hang gliding or diving offer different experience opportunities thus also providing different incentive structures. However, some commonalities can be found across all of them (Rheinberg, 2012). Hence, the goal is to identify and cluster incentives across several high-risk sports. For this purpose, an explorative study with a cross-sectional design is to be carried out.      «

High-risk sports (HRS), encompassing outdoor sports like climbing, surfing, or skydiving, have become increasingly popular. As an inherent part of these activities, there is the danger of serious injury or even death when something goes wrong. Sports psychology research explores the underlying motivation to understand and explain the behavior of persons engaging in such activities. Motivated behavior results from the interaction of person-related motives and the incentives a given situation offe...     »