Comparative analysis of crowding in multiple locations: Results from fifteen years of research

Abstract Crowding is one of the most frequently studied phenomena in the outdoor recreation literature, but almost all the research focuses on single populations or settings and individual‐level analysis. The present study uses comparative analysis of aggregate data to explore questions that single studies cannot answer. Data come from more than 17,000 individuals in 35 studies of 59 different settings or activities located throughout the northeast, midwest, and northwest United States and New Zealand. All the studies used the same single‐item measure to assess visitor judgments of crowding. Dividing the nine‐point response scale to reflect the percentage of respondents reporting some degree of crowding produced a single crowding rating for each setting. Crowding scores ranged from 12 to 100%, with a mean of 57% (standard deviation, 22%). The analyses suggest that crowding varies by time, resource availability, accessibility and convenience, and management strategy. Factors that did not affect crowding in...

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