Acceptability judgements and coping strategies for wilderness use impacts


Category:  Outdoor Recreation
Linked Publication
Language: English
Author(s): Amy F. Hoss
Description: Increasingly, natural resource management decisions are required to be "socially acceptable. " Wilderness areas are managed under a framework entitled Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) that sets standards for impacts in an area based on users' acceptability judgments. Ecosystem management also calls on managers to consider the social acceptability of their decisions. Very little is known, however, about what the judgment of acceptability means to the wilderness visitor. This thesis looks into the construct, acceptability, as it relates to wilderness conditions. Qualitative interviews of visitors to nine western wildernesses were conducted to develop a theory about meanings and associated consequences of wilderness use impacts. A follow-up study in the Superstition Wilderness (Arizona) examined the role of coping behaviors in mediating acceptability judgments. Judgments concerning wilderness impacts were classified into one of three categories: unconditional acceptability, conditional acceptability, or unacceptability. The group of users who described impacts as conditionally acceptable did so in conjunction with a mental or behavioral adjustment in order to maintain the situation as acceptable. Coping mechanisms, both cognitive and behavioral, were found to be used by wilderness visitors who faced social and environmental impacts. Those visitors who did use a coping strategy as a result of an impact differed from those who did not use a coping strategy in terms of their perceptions and acceptability of the impact in terms of how they perceived the impacts and their judgments of the acceptability or unacceptability of the condition.