Regional differences in visitors’ experiences: the impacts of natural environment to health and wellbeing in national parks

Abstract

There’s been a lot of studies concerning the relationship between natural environments and health and wellbeing. Many of them have focused on finding out what benefits can be acquired from nature and some have also made comparisons on different natural and unnatural environments and their effects on health. However, there really hasn’t been any large focus on the health benefits of various wilderness areas. This article is based on a master’s thesis. The aim of the thesis was to examine whether there would be any differences in the health and wellbeing benefits visitors experienced in one of four nature reserves (study sites) in Finland. The quantitative data was collected using an Internet survey. Altogether, there were 910 responses that were unevenly distributed across the four nature reserves. The data was analysed with principal component analysis and linear regression analysis. Results suggest there might be some differences how different wilderness areas affect people’s health and wellbeing. However, the study was unable to find any reliable evidence on what variables were the cause of these differences. Nevertheless, there was evident data to support the thesis that contact with nature has positive effects on people’s health and wellbeing. More research has to be made in order to be able to understand more about the impact of different environmental characteristics of wilderness areas on health and wellbeing.