Attitude-Strength and Support of Recreation Management Strategies

Introduction The effectiveness of recreation managers often depends on their ability to obtain a wide variety of information about the public. For example, information about future recreation demand, the quality of existing programs, the nature of new and diverse user groups, the extent to which the public will support specific management practices, and the nature of such support is important to managers providing recreation opportunities efficiently. A key to obtaining this information is assessing public attitudes toward recreation management issues. Gathering attitudinal information has, in recent years, become an important task of recreation managers because it (a) aides in the provision of a quality recreation product for the public, and (b) increases knowledge about new and diverse user groups. However, problematic of gathering attitudinal information from the public is that individuals, when indicating their attitudes on a questionnaire, often provide an attitude toward a resource management issue simply because the researcher asked for it. Often called non-attitudes, the quality of such attitudinal information is suspect. One way of assessing the quality of attitudinal information is to examine its ability to predict behavior (Bright & Manfredo, 1995). For example, attitudes that accurately predict behavior may be seen as higher quality than attitudes that fail to predict behavior. In fact, behavioral prediction has been an important use of attitudinal information addressed by researchers. Recreation researchers have increasingly drawn on attitude research in an effort to explore the ability of attitudes to predict behavior in a recreation/natural resource setting. This research has focused on factors such as the specificity of attitude-measurement (e.g., Bright, Manfredo, Fishbein, & Bath, 1993), characteristics of the individual from which the attitude was assessed (e.g., Manfredo, Yuan, & McGuire, 1992), and characteristics of the attitude (e.g., Bright & Manfredo, 1995). Research on the characteristics of the attitude have focused primarily on the strength with which the attitudes are held and the most effective ways of measuring that strength. Although it does not have a precise, agreed upon meaning in the social psychology literature, attitude-strength, in its most general sense, is viewed as the extent to which an individual's attitude is formed. While social scientists have identified many measures of attitude-strength (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995), the most commonly used measure is the extremity of the attitude (Petty & Krosnick, 1995; Raden, 1985). Most attempts to define attitude-extremity point to its operationalization, describing this dimension in terms of distance from a neutral point on an interval level attitude-scale. That is, respondents whose attitudes fall close to either end of a bi-polar scale are said to have more extreme attitudes than those whose attitudes fall somewhere in the middle. However, a limitation of sole use of attitude-extremity as a measure of attitude-strength is that it doesn't allow for highly formed "neutral" or "moderate" attitudes. Given this limitation, the extremity of reported attitudes may actually provide less real information about the attitude than researchers would like. This suggests that additional information about an individual's attitude may shed light on how strongly that attitude is actually held. Two key descriptors of attitudes that have been addressed by social psychological researchers include attitude-certainty and personal relevance of the attitude-object or issue (Krosnick & Abelson, 1992). These were recommended as key attitude-strength factors due to their ability to provide additional attitudinal information over and above the traditional extremity measure. Presupposing that the predictive validity of an attitude is an effective indicator of it's quality, this study examined the effects of attitudeextremity on the ability of those attitudes to predict voting behavior and the extent to which the predictive validity of extreme versus moderate attitudes is influenced by (a) the certainty by which those attitudes are held and (b) the personal relevance of the attitude-object or issue. …