Journal Article


The role of literary festival attendance in generating attendees’ health and well-being

Abstract

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. 

Attached files

Authors

Rossetti, Giulia

Oxford Brookes departments

Oxford Brookes Business School

Dates

Year of publication: 2021
Date of RADAR deposit: 2021-09-03


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License


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