Social-Psychological Factors Influencing Recreation Demand

Abstract

Traditional methods of estimating demand for recreation areas involve making inferences about individuals’ preferences. Frequently, the assumption is made that recreationists’ cost of traveling to a site is a reliable measure of the value they place on that resource and the recreation opportunities it provides. This assumption may ignore other important social-psychological factors influencing individuals’ behavior. In this study, the authors augment a traditional travel cost model with several of these factors, namely, individuals’ social-psychological attachment to the resource and their motivations for recreating there. Using data collected from two visitor use surveys of recreational rivers, the authors find that individuals’ affective and emotional attachments to recreation settings as well as certain desired recreation experiences have significant effects on recreation demand. These results reveal that various social-psychological constructs can be incorporated into a traditional travel cost model to create empirically and theoretically more robust estimates of recreation demand.