Recreational Activity and Place Meaning

Abstract

Although past research has documented the association between the types of activities an individual undertakes in a particular setting and the intensity of attachment that they hold for that place, little work has investigated the connection between activity type and place meaning. This lack of empirical evidence is most likely due to the fact that most place meaning studies have sought to describe the thoughts and feelings individuals ascribe to a place rather than to understand the relationships involved in meaning formation. Using data collected from a survey of recreational visitors to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, this investigation attempted to identify the connections between individuals’ type of activity participation and the meanings they ascribed to the setting in which they recreated. Results indicated that, after controlling for visitation frequency, the importance of certain meanings to the individual does vary between activity types.