Research PaperProviding information to respondents in complex choice studies: A survey on recreational trail preferences in an urban nature park
Introduction
Increased crowding, noise, air and visual pollution are some of the adverse social and environmental impacts often detected in urban environments (Kil, Stein, & Holland, 2014; Parumog, Mizokami, & Kakimoto, 2006). Green areas such as urban forests often serve as spaces to counter the stress of urban life and provide relief from high population densities (Bakhtiari, Jacobsen, & Jensen, 2014; Karjalainen, Sarjala, & Raitio, 2010). Such areas are popular places for outdoor recreation activities; however, recreational benefits which they provide might be threatened by excessive levels of visitor activity (Arnberger & Mann, 2008; Mieno, Shoji, Aikoh, Arnberger, & Eder, 2016). Outdoor recreation activities contribute to biophysical and aesthetic changes in environment, often reflected in degradation of land cover, soil erosion, disturbance of wildlife and littering (Kil et al., 2014, Manning, 2011). High use levels and undesirable user behavior can also lead to crowding and user conflicts (Arnberger and Mann, 2008, Manning, 2010). Understanding visitors' preferences for resource conditions (e.g. trail condition, surrounding landscape), social conditions (e.g. type and level of use, visitor behavior) and managerial conditions (e.g. vegetation and litter management) of natural environment is valuable in designing effective landscape management strategies (Reichhart & Arnberger, 2010).
Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) have become increasingly popular in outdoor recreation studies to investigate the preferences of visitors and tradeoffs in recreational conditions they are willing to make (e.g. Arnberger & Eder, 2011; Bullock & Lawson, 2008; Hanley, Wright, & Koop, 2002; Kainzinger, Arnberger, & Burns, 2016; Lawson & Manning, 2002; Manning, 2011; Newman, Manning, Dennis, & McKonly, 2005; Reichhart & Arnberger, 2010). Their popularity owes to the possibility of simultaneously evaluating different site conditions and underlying trade-offs, which was not possible with normative and univariate approaches used in the earlier studies. However, simultaneous evaluation of different conditions (called attributes in DCE methodology) imposes greater cognitive burden on respondents, and there is a limit on the number of attributes respondents can process at the same time (Zhang, Johnson, Mohamed, & Hauber, 2015). When asked to process too much information when making choices among competing alternatives in a DCE task, respondents often alter their decision rules (e.g. ignore some of the information presented to them) to simplify the choice task (Colombo & Glenk, 2014; DeShazo and Fermo, 2002, Erdem and Thompson, 2014). This violates DCE assumption of compensatory behavior or unlimited substitutability between the attributes, and may contribute to an increased error variance and affect the validity of utility estimates (Dellaert, Donkers, & van Soest, 2012). Therefore, information gain from providing a more complete description to respondents may be outweighed by higher cognitive burden from the larger number of choice attributes that describe a setting, which usually forces researchers to omit the attributes that they think are not essential for most of the population (DeShazo & Fermo, 2002; Louviere, Pihlens, & Carson, 2010). This could however lead to the omitted variable bias as respondents may be influenced by attributes that are not included in a DCE, causing bias in the utility estimates, particularly if omitted and included attributes are correlated (Witt, Scott, & Osborne, 2009). Giving respondents more complete information rather than offering only a subset of relevant attributes or their aggregated definition could improve the consistency and confidence respondents have in choices due to a more meaningful interpretation of alternatives (Hensher, 2006a).
The survey design should find the optimal balance between the interests in various attributes (i.e. omitted variable problem) on the one hand and complexity of the choice task on the other (DeShazo and Fermo, 2002, Witt et al., 2009). This paper discusses survey design features that may help in finding this balance – type of information presented to respondents (multidimensional vs. unidimensional attributes), and type of experimental design used to deliver information to respondents (full profile vs. partial profile design). A split sample approach was used with two different choice experiments that evaluated recreational trail preferences of forest visitors in the Medvednica Nature Park on the outskirts of the City of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, but differed in the provision of information about the recreational setting. One experiment used full profile design and included multidimensional attributes to keep the number of choice attributes manageable for respondents, while considering all relevant aspects of visitors’ experience. The other experiment included a greater number of more specific, unidimensional, attributes to describe the recreational setting. A partial profile design was used in this experiment to prevent a large increase in choice task complexity. In a partial profile design only a subset of attributes appear in each choice set (Kessels, Jones, & Goos, 2012), thus the number of attributes per choice task was kept constant across experiments. A core set of attributes used in other outdoor recreation studies was expanded by including the influence of non-visual sensory experiences, namely air and noise pollution, which were considered a concerning aspects of visitor activity by the park management. Previous studies have been mostly focused on visual experiences of visitors; however, sensory experiences, such as noise, could have a strong influence on the perception of natural landscapes and visitors' experience (Buchel and Frantzeskaki, 2015, Hallo and Manning, 2009). We compared self-reported choice certainty and perceived choice difficulty across the two experiments and investigated how different presentation of information about recreational setting affected decision behavior of respondents, utility estimates and response error variance. Understanding how respondents attended to information presented in the choice tasks and identifying limitations and advantages of alternative attribute presentation methods allows improving the design of the future choice studies (Colombo & Glenk, 2014). As environmental valuation generally involves trade-offs between complex goods and services that cannot be easily described with a restricted number of attributes, how to optimally describe a choice context to respondents is an important consideration.
The following hypotheses were examined: a) non-visual sensory experiences of nature, namely fresh air and soundscape, could be more important to peri-urban forest visitors than visual experiences, b) different information provision strategies influence propensity to non-compensatory choice behavior, and c) different information provision strategies affect the utility estimates and error variance (or choice consistency).
Section snippets
Methodology
Within DCEs, respondents are presented with multiple choice sets consisting of at least two alternatives, and asked to select their preferred alternative in each set. Alternatives differ in the values of attributes, such as resource, social and managerial trail conditions (see e.g. Arnberger and Eder, 2011, Bullock and Lawson, 2008, Hanley et al., 2002, Lawson and Manning, 2002, Newman et al., 2005, Reichhart and Arnberger, 2010). Experimental designs are used to generate the choice sets (
Medvednica nature park study
Medvednica Nature Park is a protected area located on the Medvednica mountain on the outskirts of the City of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia (Fig. 1). Since Croatia has become the member of European Union, it has become a part of the Natura 2000 network. The park, with an area of 17,938 ha, is rich in biodiversity, and is the habitat of many different protected and endangered species of flora and fauna. The main feature of the park are forests of great biological value. It has improved air
Descriptive statistics
The socio-demographic characteristics of respondents, their perceptions of several experiential conditions, perception of crowding and place attachment are summarized in Table 2. The average age of respondents was 38. Most of them were female and finished higher education. They were dominantly accompanied by their friends and/or family members, and quite familiar with recreational experience in the Medvednica Nature Park. Reported feelings of place attachment were relatively strong. Enhancing
Discussion
Considerable share of respondents had difficulty choosing between alternative recreational settings, regardless of the information provision strategy. This raises concerns over compensatory behavior in similar studies, as they often included a larger number of attributes, which may be too much for respondents to process at the same time. In the experiment A, we introduced multidimensional attributes into the choice task to keep the number of attributes relatively low and therefore prevent large
Managerial implications and conclusions
Understanding the relative importance of different trail conditions to visitors can help the park management to appropriately prioritize activities and maximize the visitor experience. In this study, as in many other European outdoor recreation areas, visitors reported relatively high levels of crowding (Arnberger & Mann, 2008). Other studies showed that visitors to high use areas can tolerate more users than visitors to low use areas, and high visitor numbers can be acceptable as solitude is
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