The recreation, parks and tourism administration (RPTA) department recently helped produce the latest California State Parks survey on the outdoor recreation habits of California residents.
Several RPTA faculty members and Cal Poly students worked for nearly three years on “The California Opinions and Attitudes Survey on Outdoor Recreation.”
The survey includes the opinions of more than 3,000 California residents on recreation topics like the kind of outdoor activities that they would like to do more and how much they would pay for these activities. The goal of the research is to influence state policy decisions about park management and recreation programs for the next five years to reflect the changing attitudes of Californians.
RPTA department head Bill Hendricks served as the project coordinator. Marni Goldenberg, Jerusha Greenwood and Jeff Jacobs also participated by overseeing focus groups that asked California youth questions about their outdoor activities.
“I hope the results published will help to improve recreation facilities across California. The research showed that most Californians are very interested in outdoor physical activity, especially in parks,” Hendricks said.
The project began three years ago when California State Parks selected Cal Poly to receive the contract for this year’s survey. California State Parks conducts a recreation survey every five years to find out the opinions of both California adults and youth. Philomene Smith of California State Parks was the survey project manager and was involved in the decision to give the survey contract to Cal Poly.
“To appropriately distribute land and conservation funds to institutions around the state, we have to know the attitudes of citizens and what changes they would like to see. The results of this research will be used to guide funding for the next five years,” Smith said.
Hendricks said this year’s survey revealed that many of California’s youth are primarily interested in specialized outdoor activities, such as snowboarding or horseback riding. This year’s survey also included a physical activity component, which measured the levels of physical activity done by Californians on a “light, moderate, or heavy” scale. The survey found that most California adults exercised at light or moderate levels.
The RPTA department was aided in its survey research by grants from several outside agencies. The California Agricultural Research Initiative awards money to California universities with agriculture programs and funded a signifiant portion of the research. The McIntire-Stennis forestry grant division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture also helped fund the RPTA department’s project. Dr. Catalino Blanche of McIntire-Stennis was involved in granting money to assist the RPTA department’s research for this project.
“We awarded about $122,000 to Cal Poly this year, but we must confirm that any intended projects follow our guidelines for forestry research before the money is used. Cal Poly is extremely efficient in producing valuable results with our grants — even more so than schools that are granted more money from us,” Blanche said.
Several Cal Poly graduate students were also involved in producing the survey by assisting faculty in running the focus groups. Recent graduate of the Agriculture Master’s program Jason Cummings participated in several of the focus groups around California.
“We went to community centers to ask kids about their experiences with outdoor recreation, and the answers we got were used to decide what would go in the finished project.” Cummings said some of the responses he received from the young people were surprising. “Many of the kids in areas around L.A. said they didn’t feel safe in parks near their homes. I hope this report can help change that.”
The complete results of the survey can be viewed online at www.parks.ca.gov/planning_SPOA.