Defining past‐experience dimensions for wilderness recreation

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Abstract
The past experience of wildland recreation users has been investigated in hypotheses of both causal and associative relationships. In the past, experience has been measured by asking visitors multiple questions about their past wildland recreation participation. These multiple items have then often been combined into unidimensional scales for hypothesis testing, without consistency in standardization or weighting methods. In this article, we describe the use of data from Cohutta Wilderness visitors to demonstrate principal‐components and factor analysis techniques to define the experience construct for hypothesis testing. These approaches offer two ways to develop linear combinations of experience variables that maintain the multi‐dimensionality of the experience construct during hypothesis testing and avoid questionable weighting and other combination processes. Factor analysis also offers the opportunity for understanding the underlying dimensions and theory building, if these are study objectives.