Would your decision to visit Yellowstone National Park change if
bears were no longer allowed to stay along roadside habitats?
If they responded that it would, they were asked to report the
number of additional or fewer annual trips they would take. This
approach, referred to as contingent visitation, or contingent
behavior, has been employed in past studies to estimate the percentage
of Yellowstone National Park visitation attributable to
wolves (Duffield et al., 2006), as well as to estimate changes in
visitation associated with various elk and bison management
strategies in Grand Teton National Park and the National Elk Refuge
(Loomis and Caughlan, 2004a, 2004b). Rather than relying on
professional judgment to determine how visitation might change
with a particular management decision, this approach allows
agencies to replace such judgment calls with actual visitor responses
(Loomis and Caughlan, 2004b). However, this approach
assumes that respondents think carefully about the question,
answer truthfully, and would actually change their behavior
consistent with how they say they would. These assumptions may
not always hold, in which case the accuracy of the predicted
changes in visitation could be impacted.