March 2018 - Parks & Recreation - 53

at specific points in time. In previous research studies on park use, the most convenient approach was to count park users
up to three or four times per day at threehour intervals for a minimum of four
days, including at least two weekdays and
one weekend day. The aggregated results
could provide a relatively accurate assessment of park use over a one-week period.
However, the limitation of these closely
spaced observations is that the findings
may not generalize to different seasons
when the parks may be used (or unused
due to inclement weather) or when the attraction of the park might vary based on
seasonal sports activities.
Although jurisdictions may have hundreds of parks, it isn't necessary to collect
data on each park to understand how the
parks are being used. A park system may
be interested in tracking how its facilities are
used. It may want to get a lot of detail about
a specific park or about specific areas within one or more parks. Typically, a sampling
strategy consists of randomly selecting a
small percentage of the parks. A random
selection should help ensure that the sample is representative and the findings may be
applicable to all parks in the system, even
those that were not specifically studied.

City Parks Alliance

Data collection training for the National Study
of Neighborhood Parks.

parks) is different from the sampled population (staffed parks), and the sample
would not be representative for the target
population. In practice, a perfect match
between the sampled and target population is usually very difficult. However,

evaluators should make the best efforts
to align these two populations.
Second, whenever possible, we should
always use a probability sample instead of
a convenience sample. With a probability
sample, everyone in the population has

Sampling Theory and
Representativeness of Distant
Observations
Conceptually, a sample is representative
if it can be used to accurately estimate
the characteristics of the target population,
which is the actual interest for measurement. Among the many technical issues
in sampling theory, there are three critical
issues in achieving representativeness.
First, the sampled population, from
which the sample is drawn, should match
with the target population as best as it
can. For example, suppose that we are
interested in studying all parks and facilities managed by the park department.
Because of logistical constraints, we may
decide to sample only the parks with onsite staff. Then, the target population (all
W W W. PA R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N . O R G | M A R C H 2 0 1 8 |

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March 2018 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of March 2018 - Parks & Recreation

March 2018 - Parks & Recreation - 1
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