Less stress: how you can respond to and manage visitor conflict.

Stressed out by visitor conflict? Relax--the good news is that the percentage of visitors reporting conflict has remained in the same range since 1980. Even better, many visitors appear to handle the conflicts themselves. So, what's a manager got to do with it? Despite the apparent good news, visitor conflict remains a salient and evolving management issue.

Although conflict has a negative connotation, it can actually be a positive influence in recreation management. Recreation conflict can indicate systemic inefficiencies, generate superior solutions, keep the organization at a higher level of stimulation and, at the very least, prevent stagnation.

Following management guru Covey (1989), who suggests that you must first seek to understand and then be understood, managers need to understand conflict, its magnitude, and visitor responses. Once clearly understood, appropriate conflict management responses can be developed, implemented and monitored in ways such that visitors understand and support your management. Commonalities among conflict situations in five recreation areas across the recreation opportunity spectrum shed insight on conflict management.

Conflict and Its Magnitude

Conflict in the recreation field includes: goal interference attributed to another (Jacob & Schreyer 1980), a tax on the visitor's coping resources (Schneider & Hammitt, 1995) and something of a cumulative nature rather than an immediate reaction to a situation (Owens, 1985). Visitors indicate conflict when they see litter, experience fear and are stressed because of other visitor's behaviors. Managers have identified visitor conflict as a common problem for more than 20 years (Hammitt, 1988; Jakes, Gregerson, Lundgren, & Bengston, 1990). Visitor surveys indicate anywhere from five to 40 percent of visitors have something interfering with their experience. Fortunately, the potential for conflict resolution among recreation visitors is high compared to conflict between other groups (Floyd, Germain, & ter Horst, 1996).

Effective conflict management requires situational specific information. In the last decade, several agencies sought visitor conflict specifics in recreation areas across the recreation opportunity spectrum. These quests revealed interesting similarities and important management implications applicable across many areas.

Understanding Visitor Conflict Through a Stress Approach

In the last 10 years, five conflict studies revealed commonalities in both visitor responses to conflict and ideas for conflict management. Common to the studies themselves were the approach and method. In each conflict situation, it was assumed that the conflict was a stress to which the visitor responded to and coped with. The approach, based on Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) model, has five major elements: (1) person and situation factors, (2) appraisals, (3) stress, (4) coping response and (5) short and long term adaptational outcomes (Figure 1 on page 68). For instance, a person biking along a trail who encounters a dog off leash may appraise the situation as stressful because of a fear of dogs. The hiker responds with immediate fear and frustration, considers their options to avoid the dog and protect themselves, talk with their group members about it, and plans to avoid the area next time they bike. Thus, the biker leaves the area with their experience quality diminished and a plan to change their visitation.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Situations appraised as stressful require coping responses. Two basic coping categories are recognized and used in tandem: problem-focused and emotion-focused (Lazarus & Folkman, 198ae). Problem-focused processes make changes in the environment or person to deal with the stress. In recreation, visitors change the time, area or total location of their activities, and are subsequently displaced.

Emotion-focused processes alleviate or change the emotional impact of the stress and encompass a diversity of options such as distancing, selective attention or avoidance. In recreation, emotion-focused coping is similar to product shift (where visitors change their expectations and ideas about an experience) and rationalization (where visitors rationalize whatever happens as part of the experience). Both short and long term outcomes result from the coping responses. Short-term, visitors have diminished experiences and potentially harbor negative feelings about a management agency. Long term, visitors may oppose management decisions, spread negative publicity or discontinue use.

Among the investigations of conflict was a second commonality among the visitors--they all responded to on-site questionnaires. Then, in four of the five studies, visitors received a mail questionnaire to get more conflict experience details and in the fifth study, in-depth interviews revealed the conflict details. Using this stress approach and questionnaires, similarities emerged in visitor responses to conflict.

Visitor Responses to Conflict

Conflict was examined among several sites that represented a range of areas across the recreation opportunity spectrum, across an administrative spectrum, and across the U.S. geography. Visitors who responded to the surveys at these sites indicated conflict between 12 and 40 percent of the time. Visitors identified 10 common responses to conflict. Most frequently; visitors followed established rules for etiquette or used several emotional distancing responses to minimize the stress associated with the conflict (Figures 2 & 3). Approaching management directly about the conflict and leaving the area or site were used less frequently than emotion-focused responses (Figure 4).

Management personnel were directly approached by between one-fifth and one-half of those experiencing conflict. Intra-site displacement was consistently identified by one-third of visitors as a response to conflict. Similarly future displacement was identified by between one-fifth and one-third of visitors at four of the five sites. The exception to these responses occurred at H. Moses Cone. Here the relative ease of contact with management likely contributes to approaching them more frequently as does the prevalent onetime visitation that precludes immediate or future displacement. Immediate displacement was used by fewer than 20 percent of respondents and, at the national park areas, fewer than five percent of visitors.

How Can Management Alleviate Visitor Stress?

At first look, results appear to indicate that visitors who face conflict do not need management intervention. However, these seemingly unmanaged responses actually rely heavily on well-communicated and established rules. In addition, personnel accessibility may influence the extent to which management learns about and can appropriately respond to conflict. Further, visitor displacement, both immediate and planned, weighs importantly in visitor management and communications.

Visitor communication is an ongoing challenge and opportunity largely influenced by site design, resources, and the visitors themselves. Still, certain communication principles remain important. Well-timed messages that are clearly presented in multiple and interesting formats at optimal times (during activity planning and onsite) from a respected source are most successful. Generally, information and education is most effective to change the behaviors of new, uninformed or unskilled visitors. Thus, interesting and appealing brochures, programs, and web pages designed for new or novice users are likely to be effective. Changing or influencing the experienced recreationist requires additional effort and will be more successful with messages that are presented in multiple formats and in multiple areas, are very specific, clear and appeal to their sense of responsibility. Engaging frequent or passionate visitors in volunteer patrols or area ambassadors may also positively influence their behavior.

Similarly, how well people can interact with management is guided by resources, site design and administration. In times of tightening budgets and resources, reliance on volunteer patrols for both safety and informal management is an obvious choice. Depending on the site, access to management personnel might be achieved through personal contact, suggestion boxes, call boxes, or Internet kiosks. Off-site access to management could be facilitated by widely publicized meetings, Internet comment cards, and a sincere open door-policy. This accessibility enables visitor relations to grow and flourish, creating a trusting and supportive client base. Displacement remains a virtual unknown for recreation managers. With few exceptions (Hall & Shelby, 1998; Kuentzel & Heberlein, 1992, Schneider & Budruk, 1999), we have information only on visitor intentions to be displaced, rather than their actual displacement. Monitoring use within a site, via entrances or trailheads, can provide information about intra-site displacement and use. Similarly, monitoring visitors who plan to change recreation times or locations can also serve as a conflict indicator. Initiating or taking part in regional visitor studies could identify important and unknown visitation patterns related to site substitution and displacement. Such an effort may also lead to cooperative marketing and other resource pooling opportunities--increasingly common and required as management resources continue to diminish.

How conflict is managed determines its ultimate effect: destruction or construction. Proactive conflict management can minimize conflict's occurrence, impact and destructive spiral. Recreation conflict is inevitable and managers must continually increase their response capability. However, with effective communication, accessible staff and attention to displacement, visitor conflict may be less stressful for both you and your visitors.

FIGURE 2. RESPONSES TO CONFLICT USED BY 66 PERCENT
OR MORE OF RESPONDENTS

                                     Percent of respondents

                        Cumberland   H. Moses   Superstition    Lake
                          Island       Cone      Wilderness    Pleasant

Followed
established rules           80          82           92           91
Didn't let it
get to me                   80          76           79           72
Went on as if nothing
had happened                66          70           71           71
Refused to be
too serious                 77          73           66           67

Note: Table made from bar graph.

FIGURE 3. RESPONSES TO CONFLICT BY 50 PERCENT
OR MORE OF RESPONDENTS

                                     Percent of respondents

                        Cumberland   H. Moses   Superstition    Lake
                          Island       Cone      Wilderness    Pleasant

Talked to
group members               92          78           64           80
Made light
of the situation            54          56           46           52
Tried to
forget it                   60          62           68           72
Thought about why
it happened                 87          60           66           85
Tried to keep
feeling to self             52          53           48           57
Wished the situation
would go away               52          43           54           72

Note: Table made from bar graph.

FIGURE 4. MANAGEMENT DISCUSSION AND DISPLACEMENT
IN RESPONSE TO VISITOR CONFLICT

                                     Percent of respondents

                        Cumberland   H. Moses   Superstition    Lake
                          Island       Cone      Wilderness    Pleasant

Talked to management
personnel about the
incident                    31          52           23           37
planned to avoid the
area on my next visit       21          11           24           36
Left the area and
went to another unit
part                        32          13           32           31
Left both the unit
and the area                 4           4           17           17

Note: Table made from bar graph.

References

Covey, S. (1990). The seven habits of highly effective people: restoring the character ethic. Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Floyd, D. W., Germain, R., & ter Horst, K. (1996, May). "A model for assessing negotiations and mediation in forest resource conflicts". Journal of Forestry, 29-33.

Hall, T.E., & Shelby, B. (1998). Changes in use of three Oregon, USA, Wildernesses. Environmental Management, 22 (1), 89-98.

Jacob, G., & Schreyer, R. (1980). Conflict in outdoor recreation: A theoretical explanation. Journal of leisure Research, 12, 368-380.

Jekes, P., Gregersen, H., Lundgren, A., & Bengston, D. (1990, April). "Emerging issues in forest management and use." Journal of Forestry, pp. 25-34.

Kuentzel, W., & Heberlein, T. (1992). Cognitive and behavioral adaptations to perceived crowding: A panel study of coping and displacement. Journal of Leisure Research, 24, 377-393.

Lazarus, R., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal and coping. New York: Springer Publishing Co, Inc.

Owens, P.L. (1985). Conflict as a social interaction process in environment and behavior research: The example of leisure and recreation research. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 5, 241-259.

Schneider, I.E., & Hammitt, W.E. (1995). Visitor response to outdoor recreation conflict: A conceptual approach. Leisure Sciences, 17(3), 223-234.

Schneider, I.E., & Budruk, M. (1999). Displacement as a response to the federal recreation fee program. Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, 17(3), 76-84.

Dr Schneider is Director of the University of Minnesota Tourism Center and Research Association in the Department of Forest Resources. She enjoys conducting research on visitor behavior, especially convict and nature based tourism.