The relationship between culture, recreation experience preference and satisfaction: The sample of Alanya

Cultural structures of societies have a great impact on recreational experiences. While recreation is regarded as ethic noise in some societies, it is viewed as a source of an activity or personal pleasure in others. For individuals, to be able to have touristic or recreational experiences requires them to have free time above all. It is because time management, which is a technique for improving personal performance, is crucial for attaining goals, monitoring what is being done, and boosting personal motivation (Güven ve Yeşil, 2015: 79). However, those who fail to manage their time inevitably get stressed (Sabuncuoğlu vd., 2010: 4). Stress cause trivial problems such as misfit characters and disagreements in workplace to become more serious ones. Also, stress leads to severe social and health problems like depression, obesity, diabetes, and suicides. A number of studies on this subject revealed that recreational experiences have health benefits resulting from both active and inactive recreation opportunities; and that thinking over past experiences like exercise, physical activity, and outdoor recreation have positive effect on depression, stress and self-confidence (CORP, 2005: 11). Time is the period when/during which an activity happens, is happening, happened or will happen (Hazar, 2014: 5). Time spent to earn money is work time. The remaining time left for all other obligatory tasks and enjoyable pursuits at home, with family, and having fun is all called free time or residual time. However, because free time is not always actually free, the term "residual time" has been chosen to differentiate this concept of time. Personal care, exercise, family care, recreation, improvements and more can be taken care of during residual time. Leisure has been described as free time for recreation activities, and is a state of mind (Shores, 2005: 2). Subjective criteria that attempts to measure free time relying on individual's experiences is equated with person-centered perspective, and objective criteria with location-centered perspective. Place-centered objective criterion include availability of leisure sources and facilities such as urban parks, sporting facilities, swimming pools, cycling and hiking trails, lakes, and community centers to residents of all ages (Lloyd ve Auld, 2002: 43-47). In this study, the effect of Cultura on recreational experiences have been identified through Hoftede's (2001: 27, 2010: 4-21) Culture Scale, and Driver's (1983: 1-10) Recreation Experience Preference (REP) Scale. The items of the scales used for the study have been created through review of literature and expert opinions. Place-centered Satisfaction Scale has been inspired from the studies of Lloyd and Auld, (2002: 43-47), Baker and Palmer (2006: 396) and Iwasaki (2007: 234). The relationship between culture, recreation experience preference and satisfaction levels in recreational areas was tested via the structural equation model. Cultura have an impact on recreational experiences preference by 56%. In addition, recreational experiences preference affect the satisfaction of the areas by around 29%.