People Preferences
This activity is about finding out what people know about their local reserve. It focuses on designing a questionnaire, completing a number of interviews and analysing the results to help the Reserve Manager find out what local people and visitors know about the reserve and what their hopes are for its future use.
OBJECTIVE: to develop an awareness of issues of conservation.
TIME: 2 - 3 hours
WHAT YOU WILL NEED: copies of the visitor questionnaire, pencils/pens, clipboards.
Before the Activity
Talk about what we mean by the terms recreation and leisure and what they depend upon. How has this changed over the last 50 years? Consider things like how much time people have, changes in the structure of families, access to transport, changes in technology and changes in the way we think about the time we spend not working.
The Activity
The Reserve Manager has contacted the school. He is looking for some help from volunteers to carry out a visitor survey to help him with the management of the site. What kinds of questions does he want answers to? A demonstration questionnaire is included. Discuss the issues with the Reserve Manager. You may then design a similar questionnaire.
Each person should carry out the questionnaire survey with 3 adults they know. People from the same family may share attitudes, experiences and values. Discuss why it would be a good idea for this survey to talk to people from different families.
Discuss the idea of sampling a population and the size of sample required.
Set a date by which the survey must be completed. The results from a whole class can be combined to give a reasonable sample size (look for 90-100). Discuss the scientific basis to this method.
Downloads
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