Commitment to public leisure service providers: A conceptual and psychometric analysis

In this investigation, we proposed and tested a scale designed to measure recreationists' commitment to public leisure service providers. We suggested that the identity of public leisure service providers is embedded in the facilities and setfings they manage. Consequently, we feel that it is important to consider recreationists' commitment to public leisure service providers by examining the meanings they associate with the settings and facilities managed by the agency in addition to their trust in the agency's ability to manage these settings in a manner consistent with these meanings. To operationalize this conceptualization, we drew upon the place bonding literature to construct a measure of agency commitment that consisted of five dimensions; affective attachment, place dependence, place identity, social bonding, and value congruence. Data were collected from two public leisure service contexts: the Chattahoochee National Forest and Cleveland Metroparks. Our analyses offered strongest support for a correlated factor model consisting of the five proposed dimensions. In addition to offering a valid and reliable measure of public agency commitment, this paper also provides an example of the utility of structural equation modeling for the systematic testing of attitudinal scales.