User Satisfaction and Crowding at Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I feel that the authors have only superficially addressed my comments, and have only marginally revised the manuscript. Admittedly, they provided some more details on the methodology, notably the sample structure. However, this raises further questions with regard to (potential) representability and thus limitations of the study, which are not addressed in the paper.

The majority of my main points of criticism were not taken into account; I thus still recommend rejection.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. We appreciate the time that you took to carefully read and review our manuscript. Please see the word document attached with our responses. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

line 149: change to "assessing"

line 198: I would change "are used and presented for analysis" to something simpler like "are done".

Methods: was the assumption of homogeneity of variances tested for all ANOVAs done, using Levene's or Cochran's test? If not, this needs to be done. If the assumption is not met in any cases, then the authors will need to try data transformations and/or discuss the implications for their results of the lack of meeting of this assumption.

Line 241-245: Its good that the authors have removed from this version now many of the mentions about non-significant "trends" that are not really informative, but I recommend they do this completely by removing also the remaining mentions of non-significant relationships from lines 241-245.

Discussion: I think there could be at least a small amount of text added about the potential methodological complexities with the use of questionnaires like this, that only get information about the people who reply, which may be different to the actual people visiting. As just one example, I could imagine that white middle class men with high incomes may often have desk jobs, and thus the circumstances for them to answer online surveys will be more convenient compared to people with lower income jobs that are more likely to be manual jobs. I did a quick search and found this study which is involved in this issue: "Sivo, S. A., Saunders, C., Chang, Q., & Jiang, J. J. (2006). How low should you go? Low response rates and the validity of inference in IS questionnaire research. Journal of the association for information systems, 7(1), 17."

Somewhere in the discussion, could the authors perhaps cite and discuss this or a similar study in regard to the implications of any bias from variability in non-response for their study?

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. We appreciate the time that you took to read and review our manuscript. Please see the word document attached with our responses. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript titled “User Satisfaction and Crowding at Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” is well structured and clearly written. It deals with interesting and relevant topics related to the users’ opinion on personal satisfaction and crowding in marine protected areas. There are certain shortcomings in different sections of the paper that need to be resolved and some general remarks for improving the manuscript content:

1. Although the authors gave a certain review of the literature dealing with this subject, it is necessary to expand the theoretical framework of the study. Is there any contemporary literature on the satisfaction of users in marine protected areas?
2. Most of the citations used in the Introduction section is over 5 plus years. It is desirable to cite more recent sources here.
3. The third column in Table 1 actually presents the results, so it should not be presented in the Methodology chapter.
4. When explaining the data collection procedure, the authors emphasized that 791 surveys were completed. However, later during the presentation of the results in the tables, we see that the sample size is actually around 300 respondents. The authors are suggested to provide additional explanations for this.
5. When explaining the sample profile, it is necessary to give an explanation for the representativeness of the sample. Is the sample dominated by highly educated men with high incomes representative of this type of MPAs in America?
6. In several parts of the text, the way of presenting the results is more "statistical", and less in the spirit of scientific research. For example, the authors say: “This means that for every additional year in age, the mean satisfaction level is expected to drop by 0.157 units“ (lines 231-232). It would be more useful to use a formulation: “This shows that the level of overall satisfaction decreases with age”. There are other similar examples in the text that should be reformulated.
7. There is no need to explain in more detail the variables in the text that did not show a statistically significant contribution, and for which data already exist in the tables (for example, lines 241-245).
8. The authors stated: “The results showed that crowding level did not differ significantly across these groups except for the education variable (p = 0.05)” (lines 270-271). So, what about education? This result should be explained in more detail.
9. The Discussion section needs to be supplemented. At the beginning of this chapter, the authors refer to studies that explain which socioeconomic categories predominate in outdoor recreation. However, the areas studied in these studies are different from the one the authors deal with, so it would be more useful to refer to sources dealing with similar research in a similar environment.
   Also, it is necessary to compare the obtained results with similar studies. The authors did this but to a very small extent, especially in the part related to the analysis of overall satisfaction (lines: 326, 351).

10. Certain parts of the discussion related to general claims and managerial implications should be part of the conclusion (lines 398-410; 433-442).
11. In the Conclusion section, it is necessary to point to the limitations of the research by explaining some other relevant factors that were not taken into consideration and could influence the results. Also, It is necessary to emphasize future research directions precisely and in more detail, especially those related to “enhancing the social diversity of the users”. In what ways this can be achieved? What is the role of practitioners? Are there already certain initiatives?

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. We appreciate the time that you took to read and review our manuscript. Please see the word document attached with our responses. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx