No Façade to Hide Behind: Long-Distance Hikers’ Journeys Through Self and Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This ethnographic study uses a phenomenological approach to better understand how Appalachian Trail (AT) and Long Trail (LT) thru-hikers create meaning and make sense of their experiences while hiking. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with 13 hikers, I analyze hikers’ initial reasons for hiking, their reflections while on the trail, and the impacts thru-hiking had on their self-concepts and social lives. Key findings demonstrate how life on the trail contrasts with hikers’ everyday lives in society and thus suggest ways that their experiences on the AT/LT may give insight into nature, community life, personal change, and the process of personal reflection. In particular, this study suggests that long-distance hiking builds personal skills and confidence. Further, this research uses a phenomenological approach as well as the concepts of liminality and communitas to analyze the creation of an alternative trail subculture and new personal identities on the trail, including trail families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".