Surfing: an avenue for socially acceptable risk-taking, satisfying needs for sensation seeking and experience seeking

Whether the personality characteristics of sensation seeking and openness to experience and participation motives differ between participants in the high-risk sport of surfing (n=41) and participants in a low-risk sport (golf; n=44) was investigated. Multivariate analysis indicated that surfers are characterised by higher levels of sensation seeking, as measured by the Sensation Seeking Scale-V (Zuckerman, 1983) and Openness to Experience, as measured by the NEO-Personality Inventory Revised (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Surfers also demonstrated higher levels of Intrinsic Motivation, measured by the Sports Motivation Scale (Pelletier et al., 1995) than golfers, while both groups demonstrated similar levels of Extrinsic Motivation. These results suggest that personality factors, together with types of participation motives, may be useful in discriminating between participants in low- and high-risk sports, which in turn could be used to promote surfing as a positive risk-taking pursuit.