Compare methods

	Visitor-Employed Photography	Recreation Opportunity Spectrum
Field	Tourism	Tourism Recreation
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1983	1979
Originator	Geoffrey Cherem & B. L. Driver	Roger N. Clark & George H. Stankey
Type	Participant-generated visual data-collection and analysis technique	Setting-classification framework for recreation planning
Seminal source	Cherem, G. J., & Driver, B. L. (1983). Visitor Employed Photography: A Technique to Measure Common Perceptions of Natural Environments. Journal of Leisure Research, 15(1), 65-83.	Clark, R. N., & Stankey, G. H. (1979). The Recreation Opportunity Spectrum: A Framework for Planning, Management, and Research. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-098. Portland, OR: USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station.
Aliases	VEP, Participant-Generated Photography, Visitor Photo Elicitation, Tourist-Generated Imagery Analysis	ROS Framework, Recreation Setting Spectrum, Opportunity Setting Classification
Related	4	3
Summary	Visitor-employed photography (VEP) is a participant-generated visual method in which visitors themselves take photographs of what is meaningful, appealing or notable to them in a setting, and the resulting images, together with the visitors' own explanations, become the research data. Introduced by Cherem and Driver (1983) to measure common perceptions of natural environments, VEP hands the camera to the visitor rather than relying on researcher-chosen images or words alone, capturing place perception through the visitor's own eyes. In tourism it has become a key tool for studying destination image, as MacKay and Couldwell (2004) demonstrated by using VEP to investigate how visitors actually picture a site and how that compares with official promotional imagery. By combining what visitors photograph with why, VEP yields a visitor-centred, relatively unobtrusive window onto how people see and value places.	The Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) is a framework for planning and managing outdoor recreation by classifying the landscape into a graded range of settings, from primitive to modern and urbanized. Articulated by Roger Clark and George Stankey for the USDA Forest Service in 1979, ROS rests on the premise that the quality of a recreation experience depends heavily on the setting in which it occurs, and that a recreation system should deliberately provide a diversity of settings so that different visitors can find the experiences they seek. The framework defines settings along physical, social, and managerial factors, such as remoteness, the density of other visitors, and the degree of on-site regulation and development. By inventorying these factors and combining them, managers classify each part of a landscape into an opportunity class and then prescribe management consistent with maintaining that class.