Activities
Summary of Outdoors and Health Network Activities:
- Communication - Creation and maintenance of an email based discussion group; web-based discussion forum and OHN website.
- Introductory Speed Research ‘Dating’ at a project kick-off meeting in Edinburgh
- Round tables - A series of 3 video conference ’round-tables’ in which researchers provide a more detailed overview of their field.
- Issue workshops - A series of 3 workshops hosted by OHN members at which researchers from different disciplines will develop collaborative strategies to tackle over-arching research questions through presentations and ‘break-out’ sessions.
- Buddying - Built-in before/ after workshops so that researchers can experience a ‘day-inthe-life’ of a researcher from another discipline.
- Conference Sessions - On ‘Inter-disciplinary studies in the outdoors and health’ at a social science conference and a biology/ medical conference.
- Project Development: development of inter-disciplinary ways of working that combine and apply the work of different disciplines and will lead to future research grant proposals.
- Additional networking time built-in to pilot project and proposal meetings.
The project development activities will focus on developing inter-disciplinary knowledge and ways of working by looking at two key areas:
Project development 1 - Longitudinal database using questionnaire/survey data
Gathering quantitative data on outdoor use and health over time: examining how social and biological/ medical scientists can work together to collect information through questionnaire and survey techniques. The project development work will investigate what types of longitudinal data could and should be collated and collected in order to populate the currently weak evidence base on the association between outdoors use, health and health behaviours.
Project development 2 - Alternative explorations of data collection across the life course
Gathering qualitative information on outdoor use and health over time: exploring how to capture people’s accounts of their lives from their own point of view and using this information to find out about the ways in which people relate to the places they inhabit and what changing roles these places play during the course of people’s lifetimes. This will be done by recording the life histories of several volunteers and relating their experiences to their use of the outdoors. Volunteers will also be asked to collect information on their outdoor use in order to explore the role of landscape/ the outdoors in the decision-making processes related to migration.
Feedback from the kick-off meeting
VC Roundtable 1 - 29th April 2009
