Enhancing the Interpretation of Stated Choice Analysis through the Application of a Verbal Protocol Assessment

IntroductionThe focus on understanding and defining appropriate management for recreation settings revolves around a three-element concept that includes social conditions (e.g., visitor encounters), resource conditions (e.g., trail erosion), and management conditions (e.g., type and extent of site management) (Manning, 1999b). These conditions are interrelated-an alteration in one variable can influence the others, resulting in the need to make tradeoffs (Lawson & Manning, 2001). For example, biophysical impacts from recreational activities can be minimized through site management techniques such as artificial surfacing, channeling use and facility development. However, the visual obtrusiveness of such site management techniques can reduce the perceived naturalness of an area. Use limitation is an alternative strategy for minimizing recreational impacts that avoids the visual intrusion of "hardened" sites and developed facilities. However, reduction of use levels will result in fewer people being able to enjoy the resource.Recreation research has relied on various types of visitor attitudes surveys and methods as one way to help understand the public's perceptions of what constitutes appropriate management. Often, studies of visitors' attitudes have asked respondents to rate a series of setting attributes that were considered to be important to the recreation experience (Roggenbuck, Williams, & Watson, 1993), or focused on evaluating the appropriate condition of a single attribute (Manning, 1999a). Within these studies, respondents are not typically asked to explicitly and simultaneously consider preferences among related and competing conditions that affect management decisions. Consequently, results of these studies provide measures of the absolute rather than relative importance to study participants of the setting attributes being evaluated. Since researchers tend to select attributes that are commonly considered important (e.g., amount of use, public access, environmental impacts), measures of absolute importance may be subject to a ceiling effect, in which all attributes are found to be important to respondents (Oh, 2001). As a result, measures of absolute importance may provide managers with limited insight into how respondents would prefer them to prioritize attributes when preferred conditions cannot be provided for all attributes simultaneously. For example, absolute importance measures tend to suggest that visitors prefer fewer encounters with other groups and unlimited public access (Manning, 1999a), yet these findings are limited in their ability to help managers judge which of these preferred conditions respondents would rather "protect" when it is not possible to have both simultaneously.More recently, there have been several types of research methods that attempt to examine relative importance measures for various recreation setting attributes, including the importance/performance approach and stated choice methods. This paper focuses on the stated choice method, which has been used to take a more integrative approach to recreation research by examining visitor preferences concerning alternative combinations of social, resource and related management conditions of the recreation setting (Lawson & Manning, 2001, 2002, 2003). Stated choice study results provide quantitative estimates of the relative importance visitors place on various attributes of the recreation setting and the extent to which they support alternative management practices designed to optimize tradeoffs related to recreation management. While stated preference studies produce findings that help assist recreation management decision-making, the quantitative results provide limited insight into the considerations underlying respondents' preferences for the setting combinations evaluated. For example, what are the various value-oriented interpretations and considerations being made by respondents in their evaluation of the study attributes? …