ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that National Park Service personnel can be effectively utilized to systematically collect visibility related information with minimal impact on their primary job responsibilities. It explains park personnel to several options available to them at three interrelated decision points in the scientific inquiry of the visibility impairment issue: data collection methods, research designs, and sampling designs. Recreation planning, management, and research is rapidly becoming more analytical, systematic, and quantitative. Such concepts as "monitoring" and "evaluation" are commonplace among public land managers. The chapter discusses archival research, structured observation, and structured conversation as naturalistic methods of data collection. Archival research is a form of naturalistic research which relies on the content analysis or synthesis of information from various documents currently available. Structured observation is a form of naturalistic research that relies upon seeing or observing particular behaviors or characteristics of visitors.
