There are two primary purposes for planning and conducting research in park, recreation and leisure services. They are:
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Increasing our understanding of why people chose and how they benefit from park, recreation and leisure services; and |
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To improve the decisions that professional park and recreation managers have to make concerning agency and organizational resources, planning and management. |
Basic Research
The purpose of basic research is to add to our understanding and knowledge in general without any particular applications or goals.
Two Primary Directions of Basic Research
methodological: asks what needs to be known?
substantive: focuses on developing efficient data collection techniques.
Applied Research
The purpose of applied research is to provide solutions to practical problems.
Attitude and Opinion Surveys
The common goals of most leisure research revolves around obtaining information about the attitudes and opinions of a specific market or community as they relate to recreation and leisure services.
It is a widely accepted belief that people generally behave in similar ways and that common attitudes can be identified from a small segment of the population, and then generalized to the wider population. Of course, there are also differences based on geographic locations, social, political and cultural experiences.
Two Factors that Shape Attitudes and Opinions
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centralizing tendencies, are monolithic attitudes, opinions and beliefs held by large groups of people. |
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decentralizing tendencies, segregate individuals into different groups based on opinions, beliefs and attitudes. |
Attitudes impact park, recreation and leisure services agencies by:
use attitude and opinion information to determine current support for the agency by the local community.
use attitude and opinion information to determine future
needs of the community.
Common Elements of an Opinion or Attitude Survey
1) Collect Community Opinions; surveys should include representation from the broader community.
Recreation and leisure surveys, collect information from the community (people who live within a taxing zone).
User surveys, collect information from the people using a particular facility.
2) Representativeness of the Survey, it is important that the survey design include efforts to obtain complete representation of the community. Minorities in a community must be represented in any survey conducted by a local agency.
The fundamental assumption of sampling is that every member of the community cannot be reached individually, so an estimate of community opinion must be determined. Two methods of representative sampling:
Sub-groups of a community are represented based on their proportion in the community. If there are 5,000 African-Americans in a community of 50,000 people, then 10% of the survey respondents should be African-Americans. Consequently, the opinion of the minority group will receive a relative weight of 10%. This has some far-reaching implications and associated problems. This is referred to as under-sampling.
Over-sampling, is sometimes necessary to alter the probability of representation and give particular communities an advantage, so that their voice can be heard. This method is no longer representative of the community in terms of its aggregate structure or the census proportions, but it provides the community an opportunity to express differing opinions.
Even in designs where there is no over- or under-sampling of specific population segments, responses may not truly represent the population. This could happen because of differences in the response rates from a particular ethnic group which may not return the surveys at the same rate as another, then the first group would remain under-represented.
3) Obtaining Estimates, is based on a small group of people being surveyed that reflect the attitudes of the larger community. Estimating is based on:
definition of the survey goals;
appropriate sampling; and
obtaining a high response rate.
Every survey has the potential for two types of errors, sampling error and non-response error.
4) Planning for Data Analysis, is compiling the data collected and has several concerns;
use of correct scales of measurement
complexity of the questionnaire
design of the questionnaire
Components of Survey Research
description of objectives
definition of the population
development of an instrument
data collection
data coding and analysis
Differences Between the Survey and the Experiment
Experiment: an effective tool for basic research which attempts to prove a hypothesis.
Survey: attempts to obtain accurate information on community attitudes, behaviors and opinions.
Copyright
2001. Northern Arizona University, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED