Tag Archives: Research Questions

So one of the pieces I am working on right now is some writing and research related to what people think and do in national parks.

We are quite blessed in the US to have an organiation (the National Park Service) that identifies great places for us to learn and play. While most of us probably think of the more nature-related parks like Yellowstone or Yosemite, there are also a lot of places that reflect our culture and history. Some examples of these include:

The Andersonville National Historic Site – is a civil war prison site commemorating American POWs

Fort Smith – a center of frontier law and order in Arkansas

Pecos National Historic Park – a triple site that includes an ancient pueblo community site, a civil war place where the Union forces were able to stop the Confederate march west, and a classic turn of the century cowboy Ranch.

So what is at the top of my mind is a) what Park Managers and personnel are concerned about that I might shed light on in my research, and b) what the public thinks about National Parks, and why people either visit or choose not to visit.

My areas of research expertise includes developing models of complex behaviors (like altruism), analyzing trends over time and space, and doing deep in-depth case studies and ethnography interviews to shed light on how people perceive and make sense of the world. Any ideas about things that I might be able to investigate that you would be interested in?