Happiness in my Life

I’ve grown up my entire life being outdoors in some form or fashion. Being a kid in Texas, I had a lot of friends and family that were always out hunting or working on something that needed to be fixed on the property or lease. I feel like that has played a direct role in how I am as a person. My research is going to see if regularly participating in outdoor activities (huntsman, fisherman, and hiker exc.) allows you to have a happier life. Literature Review In my research so far I have found exactly what I thought I would find, and that is, the outdoors does have a positive effect on people. Dodson (1960) found that when kids go camping, they are taught to rely on themselves. No one is going to set up your tent in life. No one is going to give you your dinner in life.

You have to go get it yourself. He also mentions the important idea that in camping you have to rely on others as well as yourself. Not everyone has the same job at a camping sight, some may need to collect firewood, some may need to find water and so on and so forth. Everyone has their job to do and they have to do it the right way or everyone including yourself can be affected. Dodson also points out that in reality, only wealthy families get to go camping. For the children in the inner cities they have little or no opportunity to go camping. A possible study that could shed light on this would be starting a program that takes these kids out camping multiple times, then record if teachers, parents, or mentors see any type of change in behavior in the children. In Hinkley’s et al. (2018) study we see that children who spend more time looking at a screen are subject to more health risks such as obesity, bone health, cardiovascular disease, and diminished social skills. In this cross sectional study of 575 participants of boys and girls 2-5 years old, boys spent on average 2 hours a day looking at a screen.

Girls spent an average of 2.2 hours looking at a screen. Boys spent an average of 3.3 hours outside while girls spent 2.9 hours outside. Something interesting to point out is that the girl had higher rates for expressive behavior and compliant behavior. Is this because of too much time in one area? I think that it is a possibility, the boys are outside more than the girls and they get to make the rules as they play.

This could make them more rebellious to rules and authority, whereas the girls are inside with mom or dad. A longitudinal study should be conducted to get more time lapsed results to see if the results carry over with time and possibly improve. The mothers of the children were given instructions to observe and to track their child’s time both outside and while interacting with a screen. The study found that television, DVD, and video viewing are correlated with the child’s social skills. The key to develop their social skills is that they had a balanced diet of screen viewing and outdoors play. (page 9) The outdoors and its affects doesn’t just play a role in our young children it also can play a role with our elderly, which is often a group overlooked because they’re old or because they’ve lived a long life already. Calkins, Szmerekovsky, and Biddle (2007) who studied people in nursing homes found some really uplifting results on dementia patients because of the effect of being outside.

The subjects come from 3 different retirement homes in the Midwest and have dementia. The research showed that there was a small positive relationship between time spent outside and how well the participant spelt. Calkins et al. (2009) also points out that there are other small victories in the study like the participants grabbed at the workers less and they made less noises. There was only 17 participants in the study so right off the bat, if the researchers had a greater amount of participants the study might have had greater implications because the results do show a positive change but not by a lot. Also in the study they couldn’t really force people to be outside or inside so the recorders have to have activities that incorporate being outside so that data could be collected. I feel that the study should have compared a retirement home in Hawaii or Florida vs Midwest. I would like to see a study done with dementia patients in a tropical place compared to one where residents don’t get a lot of sun/outdoors time to see if the numbers are different, just to try and validate the study more. I found it interesting that in two of my sources, all of the data was collected by simply observing behavior. I do have some issues with this because, how can mothers, and people who work at retirement homes constantly watch their child or subject? There was probably some behaviors that were never seen or written down.

Human error/laziness can come into play also, moms being too tired to write stuff down after a long day of work, so they essentially say screw it for the night. And we see retirement home workers mistreating the residence all the time on social media or on the news so there is a possibility of the workers also not wanting to take the time to properly record what is happening. The facility itself can be in question too, there is a possibility that the building itself might have an effect on the results. Acton (2016) is one that I think can have a powerful influence. Her study is all about the effects of a five day outdoor get away for young carer children.

There are 8 young carer kids that volunteered to be a part of the study after hearing about it through a charity that supports young carer children. A young carer is a child that has to take care of a loved one, sibling, or parent because they physically can’t take care of themselves. Growing up this way with so much responsibility can be damaging for a child because they never truly get to go out and play and be care free. They also are subject to more stress then adolescence at that age and it could leave lasting impressions on them. It was a quantitative (Emotional Literacy Checklists) and qualitative methods. They got their data from direct observation throughout the 5 days. They also had poems, interviews, and recorded discussion with the kids that were there on the trip.

They spent their time in the woods making crafts, playing games, and teamwork activities. In the study the kids felt connected to nature. Could this be universal when kids are outside playing together? Is the connection with nature what keeps them outside and not locked in a trance by a screen? Maybe it makes them feel better much like the senior citizens with dementia (Calkins, 2009) The Thurston Family project is a study where schools that were connected to the TaMHS program were contacted about a chance to be a part of the study.

Targeted Mental Health in Schools (TaMHS) is a mulit-agency program that trains teachers and other administration to better meet the needs of children’s mental health. Once they decided to be a part of the study they went to the outdoor center and that is where the study was crucial because subjects were about to feel like they were getting away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Another key aspect of the center was that everyone had a job to do. There were things that were expected of the residents like cleaning your bunk and your dorm room. Just by doing those few easy things parents reported that the relationship has started to strengthen because child/parent arguments were happening less and less. I would argue in my research that when you’re in the outdoors there’s a ton of jobs that have to be done and they all have to be done the right way because other people are counting on you much like in the Dodson study (1960). You can apply this to house hold chores because for a family to function properly (and to where mom’s and dad’s aren’t doing everything). There were 7 families involved and all of those were single parent households. I feel like that is a weakness in this study because it doesn’t apply to family with mom and dad present at home.

But five of the seven parents did decide to complete the full self-care course that propelled them to bettering their lives for example going back to school , becoming a class assistant, and becoming a nurse. All of the young children but one had improvements in satisfaction with school. Much like the Acton (2016), Flom, exal. (2011) set out to apply outdoor aspects to school counseling. And much like the Acton study, the children that were a part of this one also showed improvement in self-esteem, confidence and social skills. The counselors are trained in incorporating outdoor activities with the lesson plans by co-teaching with teachers by using the ASCA’s National Model. One case of this working is when a teacher noticed a number of students who didn’t have and extracurricular activities. So the teacher decided to start a fishing club and it was a huge success.

Students that showed little interest and motivation in school started to have improved behavior. And the number of students involved in the club keeps going up. This evidence shows the positive impact that the outdoors lifestyle can offer to troubled mines. I would like to see this incorporated more in college classrooms I think that it would help college students that have trouble with stress and anxiety. Tucker et al. (2016) brings OBH (Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare) into play. In my other sources there hasn’t been anything that mentions OBH but it is what Acton (2016) and McManus (2012) are doing with their subjects. OBH was developed as a form of therapy to inspire resilience, self-reliance, and teamwork to project change upon those involved. Most of the article gives you history over OBH but there is a case study that is done over a boy named Andrew. Andrew was a troubled child, he would drink and smoke marijuana, he’d get suspended from school and would defy his parents authority.

Because of his moderate substance abuse, his parents sent him off to an OBH program and even after only 3 weeks of doing activates like rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, mountain biking and building fires without matches, his defiance began to diminish and he began to buy in the program. He had found his natural high through the outdoors (page 38). Andrew had made dramatic changes and his therapist helped him create a plan for when he goes back home so that he doesn’t fall back into that downward cycle that he was in before. And through this program he found a passion for mountain biking and took that back home with him to cope with the old triggers that would previously send him back to abusing substances. The downfall of OBH is that kids do make these great strides while in the wilderness but then go back to their old ways once at home. Tucker suggests that the family needs to be integrated into the therapy instead of children being sent away by themselves because there can be underlining problems in the family dynamic that can trigger negative behavior. Research shows that families that are in a camp like setting, working together and doing activities, are brought together and form bonds that weren’t there previously (Haber 2011, page 40) Outdoor activities are also used to help people cope with extreme tragedy. In 2009 Typhoon Morakot touched down and was the strongest typhoon ever recorded in Taiwan. It claimed 704 souls and had another 18 missing and countless damage to almost 170,000 homes in Taiwan. In Chao’s (2015) study they had 292 displaced refugees that were 65 years or older. In the studys they wanted to see if the typhoon had made any of the refugees go into depression or have signs of depression based on a 10 point shortened version of the Center of Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale or CES-D. And they were also asked how often they had been outside doing activities from a scale of 1-3. 1 = not at all, 2 = sometimes (less than once a week) and 3 = often (once a week or more). They were also asked how they felt about their communities and how safe they felt it was and how friendly the people were.

The findings of this study are something to be happy about. There was a positive correlation between the amount of outdoor activities and community cohesion, meaning the more the people were outside doing activities the better outlook they had on their community an neighbors around them.

And there was a negative correlation between community cohesion and depression, the higher the cohesion level the lower level of depression in the refugee (page 943). An important thing to take into consideration is that this study was conducted 4 years after the typhoon so you really get to see the long term effect of the three variables that were being studied. Combs et al. (2015) did a very interesting study that I hadn’t come across really. I have one other source that has parental input (Hinkley et al. 2018) but not completely from the parent perspective after treatment. The study is a quasi-experimental design with no control group and it had 659 parents of children that were a part of one of 4 OBH facilities/programs. There was 792 total kids in one of these three programs but only 83% (659) completed the program. Of the 659 only 200 parents were selected to complete the 18 month follow up. If all parents were to complete the 18 month follow up there could be higher rates of satisfaction. Data was collected from the parents electronically by email.

Parents did pre-treatment assessments of their kids and reported high levels of emotional and behavioral dysfunction (page 358) but the post treatment analysis showed dramatic improvements from the children involved with most scoring out with a normal range of functioning which means they were able to act appropriately like the everyday person. Some of the kids did go back home and showed a little back tracking but nothing that was statistically significant (page 358). The clients that scored very high on pre-treatment test done by their parents showed the most dramatic improvements when it came to substance abuse, anxiety, behavioral, and attachment disorder, length of stay, age at intake, parents marital status, and adoption status. I’m immediately taken back to the OBH therapy mixed with family therapy in Tucker et al. (2016) the completion rate might have been higher than 83% if the families of the children were there to go through family exercises. Another factor could be that only 65% of the children’s families had both the mother and father at home. I can’t help but suspect that if the parents were together that one, the child may not even be there in the first place, and two would the overall completion rate be higher? Roberts et al. (2017) had a convenience sample of 186 kids that were enrolled into a wilderness therapy program. A hierarchical linear model was used to analyze the data given back. (page 45). After completing the program the clients were given the Outcome Questionnaire-45.2 or OQ-45.2. The OQ-45.2 is used to measure important functioning symptoms like: interpersonal problems social role functioning and quality of life. They had the clients take the test before, during, and after they had completed the program. In Figure 1 one (page 49) over a five week period we see a steady decline in all scores from the total score to symptom distress, social role performance, and interpersonal relationships, showing progress for the clients involved. The problem with the study is that over the 18 month period they would receive less and less responses. Starting out with a response rate of 82.3% in week one, to 42.5% response rate at the end of the 18 month period.

Even though success was found there was still a lot of data that wasn’t collected just because people weren’t reporting it back to the researchers. One can think that maybe they clients went back home and got back into the lifestyle they previously were in. Or maybe life just got in the way for some of them but I’ll go back and mention the family being incorporated to the therapy as a possibility to getting better responses and greater results thoughts the program itself before the clients leave. As we can see from the resources that I have found that there is a relationship between being outside and health/behavior whether it be medical or social applications, they can be pursued and presented to the public for the betterment of all people. The simplicity of being outside in nature soaking up the sun was our first prescription at the dawn of time. It’s time we get back to our roots and dig our toes back into the dirt.

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