I.1.b. The Retreat Experience as a journey to Self-Discovery through Nature & Other

b/ Samples : In fact, we opted for 2 categories of interview’s subject :

1) The notion of Retreat :

The first one aims at understanding the relation of the individuals with the notion of retreat and this questioning of returning to the self. The answers are collected in two ways. The first is a "micro-trottoir" survey directed at a dozen people chosen at random in the heart of the city center of Tunis, where we find a variety of people. The second is done online Via Google Form. ( https://forms.gle/d7BLfWDJhPcEK9Db6 ) The total of interviewees is 49 ( 28 online, and 21 for the "micro-trottoir" ), 62% women and 38% men, devided as shown below :

15 18 20 21 23 25 26 30 32 33 35 37 38 40 41 43 Age

2) Site Potential : The second category is a survey conducted in situ with visitors and locals (from age 16 to 55 )to identify the potential of the site studied.

The total of interviewees is 22, 71% men and 26% women, devided as shown below :

Locals 60% Visitors 40%

Retreating ... Healing...

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c/ Content analysis : After transcription of all the interviews, the corpus is analyzed. Content analysis "aims [...] to define mechanical or mechanizable procedures, making it possible to discover the organization of relatively large texts, which requires the ability to recognize the various occurrences of the same idea in different forms" 6. It is thus a question of identifying recurring general themes in verbal or textual expressions and of proceeding with an initial categorization applied to the corpus. We have adopted an essentially qualitative analysis consisting in highlighting the lexicon. In fact, we have identified all along this investigation 3 different lexicons: Spatial, Emotional/Sentiment and Activities related.

Here we take the first part of the investigation to better understand to what extent people are actually aware of the retreat subject. Most people were really conscious of this problematic and they were willing to change their mindset.

QUESTION 1 : Do you feel that Self-Discovery is important ? and why ?

“ Yes, in a world full of social restriction, one feels lost most of the time, self-discovery is what allows us to really know who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to achieve that. “

“ Yes it is ,Because if you discover yourself it helps with understanding oneself and make a good relationship with it It helps with dealing with life situations and problems “

“ Yes !! Nafsseyetna aham 7aja t5allina n9admou w na3rrfou netssarfou w n5alliw image behia 3llina donc lezem na3rref rou7i 9bal kol chay “ Retreating ... Healing...

“ Yes, because figuring out yourself is figuring out what what want from life “

“Yes, it will help me to get emotional maturity “

All this leads to living a good, healthy life as Socrate declares, so “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”, Aristotle argues; it is through ourselves that we can discover the world and what surrounds us and having to examine our inner selves from time to time leads to a better understanding of what we want from our life and from the others.