Purpose - This paper examines the under-investigated well-being outcomes of literary festival attendance. It is an exploratory study into how a festival contributes to attendees’ overall well-being. Drawing from literature on well-being and festival studies, this paper seeks to understand the well-being dimensions generated by festival attendance, and the factors that promote attendees’ health and well-being. Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory study adopts an inductive and interpretivist approach. Observations, 45 on-site interviews, and 17 follow-up interviews were undertaken at one literary festival in Ireland. Thematic analysis was used to analyse data and identify key themes. Findings – The findings reveal that attendees perceived a sense of well-being that included five interconnected dimensions: social, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Results also show that five factors generated attendees’ overall well-being: festival programme, social environment, place, weather conditions, and attendees’ background. Originality– This paper presents a new comprehensive model that shows that festival attendance has the potential to generate five interconnected dimensions of attendees’ well-being. The model also captures the five main factors that can promote attendees’ health and well-being. The model is proposed to guide further research on attendees’ overall well-being associated with festival attendance.
Rossetti, Giulia
Oxford Brookes Business School
Year of publication: 2021Date of RADAR deposit: 2021-09-03