Does intensity of nature-based recreation drive environmental stewardship?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While nature-based recreation is widely recognized for its well-being benefits, its role in fostering long-term environmental stewardship remains underexplored. This study bridges this gap by applying the Serious Leisure Perspective a framework that describes sustained, skill-intensive, and identity-building leisure participation, to examine how sustained engagement in outdoor activities cultivates ecological responsibility among recreationists in Gatineau Park, Canada. Using SmartPLS structural modeling, we analyzed survey data from 248 outdoor recreationists, assessing relationships between serious leisure (measured via the Serious Leisure Inventory and Measure) and environmental concern (using the New Ecological Paradigm Scale). Serious leisure significantly predicted environmental concern (R 2 = 0.563), with younger, educated participants showing heightened awareness. Subdimensions of environmental concern—anti-anthropocentrism (β = 0.329), balance of nature (β = 0.771), and ecological crisis (β = 0.766)—were strongly influenced by serious leisure engagement. Findings advance outdoor recreation research by demonstrating how serious leisure fosters place attachment and stewardship. We propose actionable strategies for park managers to design programs (e.g., skill-based workshops, citizen science) that leverage leisure engagement for sustainability outcomes. This study also can be used by park managers, environmental educators, and recreation planners looking for evidence-based strategies to encourage sustainable behaviors through leisure engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".