‘Seeing red’ in national parks: How visitors’ values affect perceptions and park experiences

Abstract

People's reasons for visiting national parks have been well researched. So too have their park activities and how diverse activities potentially affect visitors' park experiences (e.g. perceptions of overcrowding). Far less research has examined how park users' environmental values might affect their perceptions of other users and the appropriateness of different activities-a potential source of conflict. Relationships between personal environmental values and environmental and social perceptions are complex and interactive in the context of park visitation. Visitors' encounters with other users can powerfully affect their experience and enjoyment of parks, in turn reflecting such factors as values-related expectations and judgments in the context of national parks. Personal and social values may also play an important role in influencing whether different activities are perceived as 'out of place' in the context of national park place meaning, yet the conceptualization of values within geographic literature on parks remains comparatively weak. This paper utilizes a definition of values, derived from a concise review of the geography and social psychology literatures, to explain the results of survey research we undertook within national parks in Queensland, Australia. We use a 'values-behavior hierarchy' conceptual framework to consider how the personal environmental values of a sample of park visitors (n=404) potentially affected patterns of park visitation, user activities, and user conflicts. Findings suggest that visitors' environmental values shaped how they perceived other park users and the appropriateness of their activities. This has international implications for geographic research and other disciplines and professions involved in national park visitation, park use, and human impacts, on and of these powerful places.

Motivation and Perception of Tourists as Push and Pull Factors to Visit National Park

“…Source : [8] In the beggining of the exploration research about tourism motivation for vacation, identified some basic motivation dimension, for instance socio-pshycology, prestige, cultural, social, education, and benefit. The following research simplifies the number of motivation into four main domains that are climate or environment, relaxation or escape, adventure, dan personal [14,16].…”

“…Perception of someone's experience related to his feel involves between experience from surrounding environment stimulant and followed by activity as a responses or answer from the stimulant [18]. Perception refers to how human feels, processes mentally and acts to the information that received from surrounding environment [8].…”

“…It has been explained by Rossi et al [8] in a conceptual model that the factors mediate visitors behavior visiting national park area are motivation and perception itself. One of the theory explains about it is push-pull framework.…”

Factors Affecting the Number of Visitors in National Parks in the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria

“…Moreover, it is difficult to determine whether there is a relevant dependency between visitor numbers and highly unstable spatial variables. Meta-analyses of the recreational value of national parks with respect to biophysical, socioeconomic and regional or national dummy variables document only a few dependencies, which are, furthermore, of low significance [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. The chief limiting factor of this study, therefore, is the limited number of factors under examination.…”

“…This is true particularly for the deep Dyje river valley in the Podyjí National Park. It is therefore of interest to what extent this increased publicity translated into an increase in visitor numbers, and thus into economic benefits for local communities [32]. In Austria, the attendance of the Donau-Auen National Park remains singularly unaffected by the proximity of Vienna.…”