Sustaining outdoor engagement for teenage girls: insights from the Girls Outdoors Study

This reports presents the findings from Wave 2 of the Girls Outdoors study, a qualitative longitudinal project exlporing changing patterns of outdoor engagement among pre-teen and teenage girls (aged 12–13) in a large urban area of Scotland. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, involving an adapted River of Life technique, and a photovoice component, the study investigates how the girls' outdoor patterns are reshaped during the transition to early adolescence.

The findings indicate that this life stage is not characterised by a uniform decline in outdoor activity, but by a reorganisation of engagement across social, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Outdoor time increasingly shifts from family-led activities towards peer-oriented practices, often centred on informal socialising. The transition to secondary school emerges as a key structuring condition, with institutional routines, restricted mobility, and limited access to outdoor spaces constraining opportunities for wider outdoor engagement during the school day.

At the same time, participants describe increasing autonomy in navigating local outdoor spaces, albeit within negotiated boundaries shaped by parental regulation, perceived safety, and seasonal constraints. Peer dynamics become increasingly determinative of outdoor engagement, while mobile technologies operate ambivalently as both enablers of social coordination and independent mobility, and as competitors for time and attention, particularly in shaping not only engagement with outdoor spaces, but also the depth and quality of engagement with nature and nature connectedness.

The study further highlights the importance of micro-scale environmental conditions in shaping engagement. Girls’ evaluations of outdoor spaces foreground usability, comfort, and social safety, with maintenance, accessibility, and the availability of appropriate social infrastructure emerging as key determinants of engagement with different types of outdoor spaces.

Overall, the findings position early adolescence as a critical juncture in which patterns of outdoor engagement are actively reconfigured, with implications for the emergence of social and spatial inequalities. The study contributes to ongoing debates on youth geographies, outdoor learning, and access to nature, and offers evidence to inform policy and practice in education, planning, greenspace design and nature connectedness.

Suggested citation: Schulz, L., Banks, E., Williams, A. & Irvine, K.N. (2025). Sustaining outdoor engagement for teenage girls: insights from the Girls Outdoors Study. Report to Scottish Government. Deliverable D13 for Reciprocal Care for Nature and Wellbeing (JHI-C6-1), The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland.