Relating park visitor experience to level and degree of environmental concern within a social-psychological framework

Abstract

Recreation research has contributed much descriptive information about the visitors to natural resource-based outdoor recreation areas. What is not clear is whether their expressed attitudinal concern for these outdoor recreation resources is affected by visitation experience with these resources. While recreation user attitude studies have increased over the last decade, few have relied upon attitude theory to any great extent and fewer have considered parks as the environmental setting. The theoretical base of this research was derived from the Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) attitude model, supplemented by a social-psychological framework consisting of personal variables, social system and environmental setting components. Two general questions were tested. First, it was postulated that the level of attitude specificity would influence the amount of association between environmental concern and park visitation behavior. The study results support this postulate. The visitation behaviors were found to relate to park specific concerns rather than to a general environmental concern. The second postulate was concerned with the complexity of the attitude-behavior relationship. Although environmental concern was related to visitation experience, it was postulated that (1) the magnitude and focus of the environmental concern were related to other variables as well as behavior and (2) the social system and environmental setting constitute constraints to the occurrence of behavior. Some evidence was found to support this postulate. It was concluded that environmental concerns and individual preferences lead to park visitation and that park visitation was not a significant or primary force in affecting environmental attitudes towards natural resources. Consideration of aspects of the environmental setting, such as distance from residence, and the type of group in which visits were made may impede visitation. The evidence supporting the postulates were somewhat weak, however, the limited evidence was partly due to the difficulty in measuring the complexity of the attitude-behavior relationship. Future research should focus upon operationalizing the various components to increase correspondence between attitude and behavior measures and examining the influence of the modifier variables.