The Effects of Place Attachment, Hypothetical Site Modifications and Use Levels on Recreation Behavior

IntroductionRecreation planners and other public land managers face ongoing challenges of providing quality recreational opportunities for an increasingly diverse array of individuals on public lands. These challenges frequently revolve around issues of crowding, user conflicts, concessionaire oversight, permitting, safety, parking, and resource impacts (Siderelis & Moore, 2006). Planners and managers typically face these challenges with limited amounts of time, expertise, and financial resources to devote to problem solving and acquiring information to make objective decisions. To aid recreation planners and public land managers in weighing the potential impacts of their decisions, recent research in the field of outdoor recreation has employed an approach that allows alternative actions to be more objectively compared against one another before an agency must commit limited time and money. This approach utilizes recreationists' responses to proposed or hypothetical scenarios being considered by the managing agency. The data are traditionally acquired through on-site survey methods (Englin & Cameron, 1996). This approach provides users with hypothetical choices, most typically inquiring about the number of trips they would have taken given either changes in site quality or changes in trip prices (e.g., Englin & Cameron, 1996; Layman, Boyce, & Criddle, 1996; Siderelis, Moore, & Lee, 2000; Whitehead, Haab, & Huang, 2000). The use of such stated preference questions can be a valuable addition to observed data by predicting potential effects of management decisions. To this end, we incorporate this stated preferences approach into a travel cost model to estimate changes in recreation demand at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Warren Bridge Special Recreation Management Area (SRMA) near Pinedale, Wyoming, contingent upon three hypothetical scenarios of various site conditions and use levels.The tools recreation researchers use to measure changes in recreation demand, such as travel cost modeling or discrete choice modeling, often fail to account for social psychological factors that influence behavior. Such factors could include users' motivations, level of attachment to a recreation setting, preferred recreation experiences at that setting, or constraints. It has been hypothesized that inclusion of these factors will increase the predictive power of such models (Hailu, Boxali, & McFarlane, 2005; Siderelis & Moore, 1998). We address this gap in the recreation literature by incorporating the place-specific attachments and meanings that individuals hold for a recreation setting into a model of recreation demand that utilizes the stated preferences approach. Of all the potential influences on recreation behavior that could be considered determinants of recreation demand, we suggest the concept of place attachment is particularly influential for three related reasons. First, management agencies responsible for providing recreation opportunities are becoming more aware of the importance of place concepts and have made increasing attempts to manage for not only recreation experiences, but for "special" places as well (Anderson & Fulton, 2008; Driver & Bruns, 2008; Williams & Stewart, 1998). By examining place attachment's effects on individuals' anticipated recreation behavior, this research may provide recreation resource managers with a better understanding of how individuals' functional and affective attachments to particular places affect their recreation behavior. The second reason we suggest the concept of place attachment deserves special consideration in this analysis is, in spite of a substantial body of place-related research, very little is known about how perceptions of place may affect future recreation behavior given variations in site conditions and use levels. Hammitt, Kyle, and Oh (2009) note that research focusing on place attachment's ability to predict other recreation behaviors remains a substantial research need. …