Perceptions Of Outdoor Recreation Professionals Toward Place Meanings In Natural Environments: A Q-Method Inquiry

Bridging Managers’ Place Meanings and Environmental Governance of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

“…We also observed how managers were guided by formal policy instruments (e.g., legislation, management plans) that relied relatively less on public input throughout decision making and informal policy instruments (e.g., partnerships, citizen groups) that were more akin to deliberative ideals in public participation (Jordan et al 2005;Lemos and Agrawal 2006). This study extended past research that has investigated concepts of place among residents and visitors by shifting focus to managers responsible for representing the democratic will of the people and interpreting place meanings for the environments they govern (Hutson, Montgomery, and Caneday 2010). Our participants were aware of their own place meanings and addressed management concerns through the co-creation of knowledge built from interactions with their constituents and their professional training.…”

“…Previous research has also (a) shed light on environmental attitudes and behaviors (Kyle et al 2004), (b) predicted support for environmentally friendly practices (Vaske and Kobrin 2001), and (c) gauged responses to environmental impacts (Kaltenborn and Williams 2002;White, Virden, and van Riper 2008). In this vein, scholars have focused attention on representing stakeholder opinions while managers' place meanings have been largely ignored as a research topic (Hutson, Montgomery, and Caneday 2010). This is a critical intellectual gap with profound practical implications, because a stronger understanding of managers' place meanings is instrumental to the improvement of transparency in policy outcomes, and any assessment of their alignment with public preferences (Hendee and Harris 1970;Manning 2011).…”

“…However, investigations of place meaning and governance are often conducted in isolation despite the benefits of bridging these ideas to learn how managers' personal and professional perspectives blend with those of the people they are entrusted to represent . Further, place research has almost exclusively focused on public perception despite the role of managers to understand and, at times, help create place meanings for competing interests such as commercial fisheries, recreational opportunities, ecotourism, and indigenous use (Hutson, Montgomery, and Caneday 2010). Therefore, this study addresses two intellectual gaps.…”

Mapping Discourses of Climate Change Adaptation in the United Kingdom

“…As in LoÕs (2016) study of climate change discourses in Hong Kong, we assert that Q-method allows us insight into the different groupings of stakeholder perspectives on climate adaptation and their socio-political underpinnings Ð in essence it reveals the ways in which heterogeneous public actors socially construct and demarcate the adaptation concept in discourse. Unlike a traditional social survey, we seek not to measure traits that are Ôout thereÕ in the world, but rather to determine segments of subjectivities that a person, or groups of people, have toward a particular context or phenomenon (Hutson et al 2010). We make no claims about the relative prevalence of adaptation perspectives nor its geographic/demographic distribution; and as Martin (2008) asserts, there is no fundamental reason to assume that representation in terms of demographic variables would translate into representation in terms of perspectives (see also Cuppen et al 2010).…”

Identification and Prediction of Latent Classes of Hikers Based on Specialization and Place Attachment

“…However, this study overlooked the various forms of attachment in the psychological context by using mean spilt. In this regard, Hutson and Montgomery [42] considered various aspects of place meaning by using a qualitative approach (i.e., an exploratory Q); they identified three types of place meaning among stakeholders (i.e., intensity seekers, sense of self seekers, and spirituality seekers). These findings suggest that more attempts to capture different dimensions or views of place meaning would be warranted.…”