Explicit versus implicit motivations: Clarifying how experiences affect turkey hunter satisfaction using revised importance-performance, importance grid, and penalty-reward-contrast analyses

ABSTRACT

Although research has advanced methods for clarifying factors that relate to customer satisfaction, they have not been embraced by leisure researchers. Using results from a survey of wild turkey hunters, we applied traditional and revised importance-performance (IPA/RIPA), importance-grid analysis (IGA), and penalty-reward-contrast analysis (PRCA) to examine how activity-specific factors influenced satisfaction. Results suggested differences between the explicit and implicit importance of factors related to turkey hunting. Opportunities to kill turkeys were explicitly rated as less important than seeing, hearing, or calling in turkeys, but opportunities for harvest had relatively higher levels of implicit importance. PRCA identified “calling turkeys in” and “hearing gobbling” as minimum requirements that cause dissatisfaction if not fulfilled, but do not provide satisfaction, whereas “seeing turkeys” and an “opportunity to kill a turkey” related to both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. RIPA, IGA, and PRCA could provide valuable insights about factors that may improve satisfaction for leisure participants.

KEYWORDS:

• importance-grid analysis
• importance-performance analysis
• penalty-reward contrast analysis
• recreation satisfaction
• turkey hunting experiences

Funding

This work was supported by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Notes

^1. Albayrak and Caber (2013a) stated that customer satisfaction studies use a value of 5 to identify a high level of customer satisfaction on a 5-point scale and that “5 should be considered as the predictor of a high performance level” (p. 1297).

^2. Weights correcting for nonresponse bias were calculated based on differences in responses to the main questionnaire and the follow-up questionnaire and were applied to these data. Although there were a few statistically significant differences between the weighted and unweighted data, weighting the data did not change results beyond the margin of error for the questionnaire.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.