Socioeconomic Research & Monitoring Program for Olympic Coast - Recreation
In 2014-15, a study was conducted on the outdoor recreation activities of Washinton households on the Outer Coast of Washington. The primary focus was on the entire Outer Coast of Washington to support the State’s Marine Spatial Planning Initiative and on the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary (OCNMS) to support their socioeconomics action plan. Socioeconomic profiles were created for the entire study area and for OCNMS. For OCNMS, socioeconomic profiles were created for sanctuary waters, sanctuary waters with a two kilometer buffer along the coast, and a small section of the Port Angeles waterfront around the sanctuary office and visitor center.
The survey was conducted using a probability based online survey. A representative sample of Washington households resulted in 5,538 responses over two waves of surveys. The results are published in four volumes.
Volume 1 - Socioeconomic Profile Report
Volume 1 focuses on socioeconomic profiles, including demographic profiles of users (e.g. age, gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, education level, household size, housing type, employment status, household income and place of residence, (e.g. zip code and county); uses (activity participation rates, person-trips and person-days by activity type), and expenditures per person-trip, per person-day, and total expenditures by expenditure category.
Volume 2 - Economic Impact/Contribution of Users
Volume 2 includes information on total annual expenditures by spending category and the associated economic impacts/contributions to the local economy in terms of total output/sales, value-added (regional; gross product), income and the number of jobs, including multiplier impacts.
Volume 3 - Importance / Satisfaction
In Volume 3 users rated 25 natural resource attributes, facilities and services as to both their importance and satisfaction of their recreational experience. The analytical framework is called importance-satisfaction or importance-performance analysis. The analysis maps each item into four-quadrants based on “relative importance” and “relative satisfaction” of each item. The four quadrants are labelled “Concentrate here (relatively high in importance and relatively low in satisfaction); “Keep up the Good Work” (relatively high in importance and relatively high in satisfaction); “Low Priority” (relatively low in importance and relatively low in satisfaction); and “Possible Overkill” (relatively low in importance and relatively high in satisfaction).
Volume 4 - Technical Appendix
Volume 4 provides all the details on the methods of estimation used in Volumes 1-3 and is primarily for those who provided peer review and for audiences that would like to replicate the study in the future.
Volume 5 - Non-Market Value of Recreation Use Technical Appendix
This is the Technical Appendix to the non-technical main report of findings on the non-market economic value of outdoor recreation use on the Outer Coast of Washington and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. The recreation activity was by those from Washington households that participated in outdoor recreation on the Outer Coast of Washington in 2014. The attributes approach to valuation was used to value changes in natural resource conditions from the "Status Quo" or low condition (i.e., the condition the resources will be in if existing policies and management continue over the next 10 to 20 years) and improved conditions to a medium and high condition. Many different techniques can be used and we chose the discrete choice experiment approach. Values were also estimated as a function of user characteristics (e.g. per capita income, experience with the Outer Coast for recreation, and user's ecological worldview).
Volume 6 - Non-Market Value of Recreation Use
This is the main, non-technical report detailing the findings on the non-market economic value of outdoor recreation use on the Outer Coast of Washington and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. The recreation activity was by those from Washington households that participated in outdoor recreation on the Outer Coast of Washington in 2014. The attributes approach to valuation was used to value changes in natural resource conditions from the "Status Quo" or low condition (i.e., the condition the resources will be in if existing policies and management continue over the next 10 to 20 years) and improved conditions to a medium and high condition.