Measuring satisfaction: analyzing the relationships between sociocultural variables and functionality of urban recreational parks

Urban recreational parks have a wide range of ecosystem services including health, social, tourism and cooling effects. With significant contribution to improving life quality of urban residents, successful maintenance of urban recreational parks heavily relies on visitors' profile information. In this case, this study attempts to analyze the relationships between different characteristics of Koohsangi Park in Mashhad City, Iran, with sociocultural variables of park visitors to explicitly measure their recreational satisfaction level. In this case, descriptive and inferential statistics (Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance and Pearson correlation coefficient) approaches were applied to conduct analyses of this study. A collection of variables was considered among gender, age and monthly income of the visitors which were more important and informative for management practices. According to the results, Koohsangi Park has its own user portfolio based on sociocultural variables such that there is a general urban park user profile as age between 20 and 40, married, employee, B.Sc. graduate, mostly male and belonging to middle-high income groups. In addition, positive bivariate association between monthly incomes of the visitors and their willingness to pay entrance fee was identified; however, majority of the visitors had a tendency to pay less than 1 US dollar as entrance fee. This study suggests that users' opinions on different characteristics of Koohsangi Park could be instructive for park management and city authorities who normally decide on the future development of urban parks and their success could substantially benefit from such information.