Questionnaire Overview

The survey questionnaire consists of four parts and was designed to achieve the main objective of the research which is to value environmental goods using Contingent Valuation Method, a study funded by the Ministry of Science and Environment, Malaysia, under the IRPA program. The first part of the questionnaire is introduction to solicit voluntary participation, the second part is background information focussing on their island visit, the third part solicits opinions regarding nature conservation, and the final part attempts to capture the respondents' socio-economic background. However, for the purpose of this paper, we concentrate on the third and final part of the questionnaire in order to capture the tourists' preferences and motives for making their visit to the island and their attitudes towards nature and environment in general.

To address the preferences and motives of their island visit, questions as to whether the choice of visit to Pulau Payar was made voluntarily or it was already included in a package tour were posed. Respondents were also asked about the types of activities at Pulau Payar that they were most interested in. Their perception on attributes and amenities available at Pulau Payar were also solicited. For the purpose of gauging their attitude towards nature and its conservation, a 12-item attitude instrument was constructed. The instrument consists of seven positive and five negative statements from the elements of "feeling," "belief," "should," and "would" (Mueller, 1986). The responses were in the form of a 4-point Likert scale ranging from "Strongly Agree" = 1 to "Strongly Disagree" = 4 for all statements, whether positive or negative. The scores for positive statements were later reversed during data analysis, so that "Strongly Agree" = 4, and "Strongly Disagree" =1. After this conversion, the scores were summated to form the attitude scale. Finally, some socio-economic background questions were posed to capture the profile of the visitors.

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