A Study on the Users’ Behavior and Satisfaction for Forest Interpretation Program Design

A survey was conducted on 179 participants of the ongoing forest interpretation program to analyze the users’ behavior of participants, satisfaction with the forest interpretation program, satisfaction factors, and prediction models to provide basic data for the development and operation of the forest interpretation program. The participants were female(59.2%), in their 40s(46.4%) with their families(68.2%), and the most frequent purpose was experiential learning(33.5%), child education (29.6%,) and healing(27.9%). As shown in the users’ behavior analysis and importance-satisfaction analysis, the maintenance of facilities for children and the internalization of the contents of the commentary program are the first factors to be improved as there are many family participants. As a result of the factor analysis, five ‘program factors’, ‘scale factor’, ‘publicity factor’, ‘facility factor’, and ‘convenience factor’ were interpreted as influencing satisfaction, and it was concluded that improving the convenience of using parking lots and other facilities, as well as improving the facilities of the places where forest interpretation programs are held, preparing appropriate education venues, appropriate participation, strengthening publicity, and, above all, improving the content of the program, such as the contents, auxiliary materials, training time, and cultivating the qualities of forest expounders, are important factors. As a result of conducting a multiple linear regression analysis with overall satisfaction and 18 independent variables, “diversity of forest interpretation programs,” “convenience of rest facilities,” “number of program participants,” and “program duration” were found to be statistically significant variables, and a prediction model was obtained in which efforts to improve satisfaction with these items were the main variables affecting overall satisfaction.