Visitor sample surveys

This paper discusses the design of visitor surveys. To illustrate, two recent surveys are described. The first is a survey of visitors to National Park Service areas nationwide throughout the year (1992). The second is a survey of recreational users of the three-river basin around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during a twelve-month period. Both surveys involved sampling in time with temporal as well as spatial stratification. Sampling units had the form of site-period pairs for the stage before the final, visitor sampling stage. Random assignment of sample sites to periods permits the computation of unbiased estimates for the temporal strata (e.g., monthly and seasonal estimates) as well as estimates for strata defined by region and by type of use.