Coding Manual for “The Nature Voices of People Who Visit Discovery Park: An Interaction Pattern Approach”
Citation
Kahn, P. H., Lev, E., Chen, H., Esperum, G., Piatok, H., Aberg, N., Weiss, T., … & Koch, T. (2019). Coding Manual for “The Nature Voices of People Who Visit Discovery Park: An Interaction Pattern Approach”.
Spending time in nature is important for both physical and mental health, yet growing cities often place pressure on the natural areas people rely on for these experiences. Discovery Park—Seattle’s largest park, with more than 500 acres of land and nearly 12 miles of trails—is one such place where future development is being discussed. This study set out to understand how visitors experience and connect with nature in the park.
To do this, researchers used an Interaction Pattern Approach. “Interaction patterns” are basic ways people connect with nature that are described broadly enough to include many different specific examples of each type of interaction. After visiting Discovery Park, participants were invited to a website to describe a meaningful moment they had with nature during their visit. They also answered a few basic demographic questions.
This report shares the method researchers used to organize and interpret these written experiences. By making the approach publicly available, the researchers aim to support future research on how people interact with nature—especially in especially natural landscapes.
Abstract
Interaction with nature is vital for human physical health and mental well-being, yet urban development continues to put pressures on natural areas that allow for essential forms of human-nature interaction. Discovery Park, the largest park within Seattle—with over 500 acres and almost 12 miles of walking trails—is a case in point insofar as some Seattle constituents would like to develop some of its open space. The goal of this research is to give voice to how visitors of Discovery Park interact with nature at the park. To accomplish this, we applied an Interaction Pattern Approach, where “interaction patterns” are defined as fundamental ways of interacting with nature that are characterized abstractly enough such that many different instantiations of each pattern can be engendered. After their visit to Discovery Park, participants were asked to access our website (what we called “the Nature Language Website”) to write a few sentences or paragraphs that described a meaningful experience they had interacting with nature in the park. Participants were also asked a few demographic questions. This technical report provides our coding manual—our systematic method to code the qualitative data—of people who visited Discovery Park, and who wrote of how they interacted with nature in the park. This technical report thereby provides open access to our core intellectual qualitative work on this project. It can be used by others to conduct related research on how people interact with nature, and especially natural landscapes.