Psychosocial wellbeing as the outcome of the City festival celebration

• Multicultural festivals contribute to strengthen multicultural societies through positive psychosocial, social and cultural benefits for individuals, groups and communities/societies (Lee et al., 2012).Especially, these includes positive feelings and emotions that are created with attendees in the festival (Kim et al, 2016).The purpose of this descriptive research is to get an understanding of the Persian Fire Festival’s visitors in Stockholm and their subjective reasoning around the feelings and emotions that are created through their celebration. 280 visitors/attendees answered to the question “What emotions does it evoke to celebrate the Fire Festival with you?” that was included in an online questionnaire. Excepting a few irrelevant answers, the predominant majority gave clear examples of positive feelings and emotions and some of them mentioned up to six feelings. Happy/happiness has been the most expressed feeling. The other frequent feelings have been: welcome the spring and the new year; pride/proud; community; belonging and togetherness; nostalgy; and home feeling. A very few people also mentioned sad feelings such as homesickness and missing family. The results show an overall positive impact of the festival celebration on the visitors’ psychosocial well-being. They also give rise to the question how such festival arrangements through increased positive feeling can contribute to stronger feelings of identity, belonging and community and thereby results in better socio-cultural integration of these people into the society.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Östersjö- och Östeuropaforskning

Baltic and East European studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)