Quality-Of-Life Community Indicators for Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management - Hardcover

by Megha Budruk (Editor), Rhonda Phillips (Editor)

While community quality-of-life indicators are gaining much needed attention in both scholarly work and practice, their application in the areas of parks, recreation and tourism management are not as well known. The applicability of indicator systems for natural resource and natural resource area management within the parks and recreation arena is very high, including urban parks and recreation programs and their influence on quality of life.

Tourism is also an area that needs much more work in terms of assessing impacts as well as developing indicators for gauging progress in the long term. All three areas are an integrated discipline and most programs throughout the developed world are housed co-jointly. There are several researchers across the globe who are conducting innovative work in these areas. The editors feel that a volume on the topic will spur additional interests as well as serve to lead the research efforts.

Back Jacket

Within the parks and recreation field, measuring the effectiveness of recreation programs or resource management is vitally important. The same holds true for tourism management. Community indicators represent a way to assess management frameworks and gauge their impact on quality of life. The three areas of parks, recreation and tourism comprise an integrated academic discipline. Across the globe, researchers in this discipline are conducting innovative indicator research; however, very little literature is available. This books rises to fill that need by providing a compendium of example studies that reflect the range of work currently being conducted.

Quality-of-Life Community Indicators for Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management presents cutting-edge research in community indicators, focusing on quality-of-life aspects. It covers many topics, such as indicators and its standards in parks and outdoor recreation, leisure and relationship to quality-of-life satisfaction, development of a tourism and quality-of-life instrument, and sustainability indicators for managing community-based tourism as well as other sustainability issues. In addition, it details models of successful indicator systems and includes case studies from around the world. Aimed at students and researchers interested in the application of community indicator systems to pertinent issues in parks, recreation and tourism, this book simultaneously informs on the latest research in the area while providing impetus for future research efforts.

Author Biography

Megha Budruk is an Associate Professor in the Parks and Recreation Program at the School of Community Resources & Development, Arizona State University. Her primary research interests include human relationships with natural settings, specifically- place attachment and sense of place. Other research interests include crowding and indicator-based social carrying capacity, beneficial outcomes of natural resource recreation, and visitor impacts, experience and management at natural and cultural resource settings such as parks, protected areas, and cultural monuments.

Rhonda Phillips is Professor and Director of the School of Community Resources and Development, Arizona State University. Her research and practice speciality has focused on community well-being including work with arts and tourism-based development and economic development planning. She is the Editor of Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society.