Environmental Factors Affecting Where People Geocache

Jennifer Golbeck and Carman Neustaedter
Additional contact information
Jennifer Golbeck: College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Carman Neustaedter: School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada

Future Internet, 2016, vol. 8, issue 2, 1-6

Abstract: Outdoor leisure activities are important for public health as well as family cohesiveness, yet environmental factors may easily affect someone’s ability to participate in such activities. We explored this with a focus on the social web-based treasure hunt game called Geocaching. We collected data on all US and Canadian geocaches from OpenCaching.com and conducted an online survey with twenty geocachers as a follow-up to our data analysis. Data analysis showed that geocaches were more often found in areas that were wealthier, better educated, younger, and more urban, and had higher population density and better weather. Survey results showed similar trends: Most people actively thought about where they would cache and tried to minimize risks, despite cache hiders thinking less about these concerns. These results further emphasize the importance of environmental factors when it comes to participation in outdoor activities and leads to Human–Computer Interaction design implications for location-based online social activities.

Keywords: geocaching; leisure activities; outdoors; physical activity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/8/2/11/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/8/2/11/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jftint:v:8:y:2016:i:2:p:11-:d:68046

Access Statistics for this article

Future Internet is currently edited by Ms. Grace You

More articles in Future Internet from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().