Activity Specialization Among Ohio's Recreation Boaters

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Abstract
Participation in water oriented recreation is often characterized by strong activity preferences. More than two-thirds of a sample of recreational boaters in Ohio during 1966 specialized in either sailing, water skiing, pleasure cruising, or fishing (a fifth group was defined as non-specialized). The purpose of this article is to identify the characteristics that differentiate boat activity specialists. For this purpose, the Automatic Interaction Detector (AID) program is used. AID analysis has the advantage that no assumptions need to be made concerning the distributional attributes, level of scaling, or intercorrelation of independent variates. As an analytic device, the AID multivariate technique provides a strong predictive tool for characterizing activity preferences. Twenty-one variates are used to predict the degree of activity specialization as indexed by the percentage of total boating time in 1966 devoted to one activity. The three types of variates are social status, size and type of equipment, and time expenditures, including travel time and on-site time. The most important predictive variates are horsepower of outboard engine, type of boating group (e.g., family or friends), length of boating experience, and time spent at the site. The first three variates entered in each of the four programs accounted for 46 percent of the variance of water skiing, fishing, and pleasure cruising. For sailing, the fourth activity, 83 percent of activity specialization is explained by the presence or absence of an outboard motor, length of ownership, and time at the site. The most interesting conclusion is that the normal social variates are not predictive of activity specialization. Because the dependent variate is allocation of recreational time to specific activities, rather than rate of participation, this study does not contradict conclusions drawn in other studies.