Recreation Experience Preference Scales

The Recreation Experience Preference (REP) scales are a hierarchical battery of self-report measures, developed by B. L. Driver and colleagues over three decades, that quantify the desired psychological outcomes people seek from recreation. Rather than asking which activity someone prefers, REP asks why — capturing the experiences a person hopes to attain, organized into broad domains (such as enjoying nature, escaping pressure, achievement, affiliation, and learning) that each contain narrower scales. Manfredo, Driver, and Tarrant's 1996 meta-analysis in the Journal of Leisure Research consolidated more than three dozen studies that had used REP items, documenting a stable factor structure and reliable subscales and establishing REP as the standard motivational measure in outdoor recreation. The instrument operationalizes the behavioral, or expectancy-valence, view that recreation is goal-directed: people choose settings and activities expecting to satisfy specific experiential goals.