Lindberg

Assessing the needs and habits of hikers, bikers, swimmers and the other recreators in Oregon requires more than a network of comment boxes.

To get the job done, Oregon Parks and Recreation tasked Kreg Lindberg, an Oregon State University-Cascades Campus associate professor of tourism and outdoor leadership, with figuring out what everyone thinks. With Randall Rosenberger, who is based at OSU in Corvallis, Lindberg developed a survey that allows the state to examine outdoor recreation across Oregon.

“The main goal is to identify recreation trends and where we are falling short,” said Lindberg, 49. “We want to be able to help set the priority for the state and local agencies. For instance, if there’s a real growth in mountain biking, then when it comes to grant programs, the state may prioritize biking trails.”

To conduct the survey, Lindberg contacted 50,000 Oregonians last year by mail. Instead of randomly mailing residents, he stratified his sample by county, meaning that enough surveys were sent to rural counties to ensure a large enough response. By stratifying his sample, Lindberg avoided the risk of having his survey focus on the Portland metro area, which, due its large population, would dominate any straightforward random sample of Oregonians.

“Often these surveys are only done on a statewide basis, and the issue is you can only talk about the state,” Lindberg said. “We may see stand-up paddleboarding as a big area here, but that local need may be lost in the noise if we didn’t stratify the sample.”

Terry Bergerson, an Oregon Parks and Recreation planning coordinator, said Lindberg’s survey affects how the state distributes funding and that it offers an important tool for districts too small to complete their own needs assessments.

“Some of the bigger places have sufficient resources to do their own surveys,” Bergerson said, noting that Bend often conducts surveys. “But a lot of the population lives in smaller communities, and we’ve developed manuals for local communities to use this information.”

So what do residents of Deschutes County need? The survey found a demand for more drive-in tent sites. Residents also expressed a desire for more soft-surface walking trails, access to waterways and off-street bicycle trails. Playgrounds with natural materials, picnic areas and wildlife viewing areas were also in demand. Meanwhile, don’t expect Bend’s street basketball scene to explode — residents ranked the need for outdoor courts and sports fields as the lowest priority.

Lindberg is currently working on a follow-up study that looks more closely at trail needs.

“Oftentimes the needs for trails are very specific,” he said. “In areas people may think it’s important to have lights on trails, such as in a city. Maybe not for locals in Bend, but you can imagine proximity to food being important. Also, what about hard- versus soft-surface trails?”

The surveys are not only meant to gauge satisfaction with Oregon’s recreation opportunities, they also are useful for studies of economic development and tourism, as well as gauging attitudes toward conservation. But beyond these traditional applications, Lindberg argues the data he collected has public health implications.

“There’s a lot of interest around the obesity issue, and of course trail recreation typically involves physical activity,” Lindberg said. “The question is to what degree are trails providing health benefits, and can we prioritize trails from that perspective?”

From the islands

Lindberg grew up on Oahu where he “lived with the sand and beaches.” He and his father would go backpacking on the Big Island’s volcanoes, an act which Lindberg said “planted the seed, professionally and personally, that later became a big part of my life.” For college, Lindberg traveled 5,000 miles to Dartmouth in New Hampshire, where he wanted to study neuroscience but fell into European history, neither of which related to his later career. After Dartmouth, he went to Johns Hopkins to study international relations, but a summer internship with the World Resources Group realigned his childhood interest in nature with his professional path.

“I ended up at a merger between tourism and conservation, and that’s how I really got started,” Lindberg said.

In the mid-1980s, the WRG was beginning to push the sustainability discussion, and Lindberg focused on the question of how governments can generate money to support conservation by harnessing tourism dollars. This focus doesn’t neatly fit into the field of forestry, something Lindberg acknowledges. Regardless, he found his way to OSU’s forestry school, where he completed his doctorate in 1995.

“OSU forestry was pretty well funded in terms of scholarships, and they seemed fine with me not having a forestry background,” Lindberg said. “So, yeah, I had to take some remedial courses in forestry, but I was able to focus on recreation and tourism. My dissertation was on the social impacts of tourism on the Oregon Coast, which had nothing to do with forestry in the traditional sense but used tools and methods that came out of natural resource economics.”

After graduating, Lindberg taught in Australia and Norway, but the confluence of 9/11 and family matters brought Lindberg back to the States, first to Colorado State in Fort Collins and then to OSU-Cascades. Lindberg had been to Bend a few times before coming to the university, but only on ski trips he made with classmates from OSU.

“I still remember that first drop from the Nordic Lodge before you go down Screamer,” Lindberg said. “I was a mediocre skier, and I can remember my friends were loving it but I was definitely doing some snow plowing. It’s fun to come back 10-plus years later and have Bachelor in the backyard.”

Neutral questions

Lindberg’s contribution to the state’s recreation surveys may seem below an academic — he writes and orders the questions.

“Survey design is kind of an art and a science,” Lindberg said. “Anyone can put a survey together, but there are techniques for making it more effective and ensuring people understand the question as you intend and that you are efficient in asking the question so people don’t get tired of doing the survey.”

Some of the things Lindberg focuses on include the flow of questions, so that “changes from one topic to the next are not too abrupt.” He also pays attention to how white space is used, as respondents may not react well to a piece of paper that is too dense with text. Lindberg also avoids one of the most common interrogation techniques — “double barrel” questions, which allow for only one answer while containing two differentiable questions.

“You also need to make sure you’re not leading people,” Lindberg said. “You’ll see some questions on TV, they’ll say, ‘Obamacare is the worst idea since something or other, do you agree, yes or no?’ By that phrasing, you know there will be bias in the responses, so we try to minimize bias. Every human has bias, but we try to keep questions as neutral as possible.”