Measuring Landscape Preferences Survey Preliminary Report

The on-line phase of the PEI landscape survey is complete with analysis ongoing. This report will summarize the process, response and top-line results.

Two e-mail newsletters were used to invite participants in the Masters of Arts in Island Studies Landscape Preference research. Tourism PEI's email newsletter is sent to about 100,000 subscribers, mostly living off-Island and who became subscribers via a visit to the tourism website or through a marketing initiated contact (responding to Tourism PEI advertising via phone, contest or business reply card). One thousand, one hundred and forty seven surveys were completed; 1254 started the survey for a 91.47% completion rate.

The second e-mail invite went to subscribers of the Tourism Industry Association of PEI's newsletter (about 700 in total). Of those, 56 started the survey and 46 completed it for a 82.14% completion rate. It should be noted that many PEI tourism operators are located within rural areas of the province and not all have access to high-speed internet, which would have created significant challenge to completing the graphic-rich survey - load times on dial-up access were noted to be slow.

Participants were invited to rate in terms of scenic beauty (on an un-numbered scale of 0-9) some 31 shots of Island landscape. The photos were taken over a few weeks in late summer of 2005, according to recommended process in similar research projects (mid-day, minimal framing features, similar balance of land to sky etc. i.e. no "beauty shots" per se) The collection included coastal and inland scenes, and both developed and undeveloped landscapes. The development included traditional farm sites as well as cottage or newer construction.

The TIAPEI respondents took an average of 8.5 minutes to complete the survey while the Tourism PEI respondents needed only 6.5 minutes on average which supports the idea that dial-up connections may have challenged some PEI residents.

Of the 1147 respondents to the Tourism PEI survey, 40 are residents of PEI while the largest number of the 1140 remaining respondents (26.4%) live in Ontario, a figure typical of the makeup of tourist visitors to PEI. The next largest group was from Atlantic Canada (20.9%) , followed by the category Other US (14%), again fairly representative of tourism visits to PEI.

In general, both groups found the Island landscape scenes to be of more than average attractiveness. The mean score for the larger Tourism PEI sruvey was 5.9 (average standard deviation 1.63) on the 0-9 scale, while the mean score for PEI respondents (the TIAPEI survey) was 5.7 on the 0-9 scale (average standard deviation of the smaller group was 1.84 ). The off-Island scores ranged from a low of 4.36 to a high of 7.4, while the Island responses ranged from 3.61 to 7.96.

The scenes were grouped into four general categories to further determine preferences, described as: Coastal/no development; Inland/no development; Coastal and non-coastal/traditional development; Coastal/non-traditional development. The analysis of these categories continues.

Possible next steps in the Measuring Landscape Preferences research could include a testing of a visual measurement scale that would employ best, medium and worst images from the first survey as the standards against which participants would rate the scenes; a community meeting to allow not only quantitative response but more subjective response to various scenes; use of photo alteration software tools to collect response to possible future landscape scenarios.