Mapping Risk Judgment and Risk Taking in Mountain Hiking: An Information Integration Approach

Risk analysis is essential for promoting hiking-based tourism. Our objective in the present study was to map 395 mountain hikers' positions on risk judgment and risk taking, according to how they integrated three antecedent factors of confidence (environment, team, and self). For integrating information, people can develop an additive rule whereby they apply the same weight to all information or use interaction rules (i.e., conjunctive or disjunctive), to give different weights to information. In the questionnaire our participants completed, there were eight scenarios that combined the three confidence antecedent factors as information cues. We applied cluster analysis, repeated-measures analyses of variance, chi-square tests, and bivariate correlation analyses to the questionnaire results to identify three participant risk positions. In the first risk position (cluster 1), participants used a disjunctive integration rule for both risk judgment and risk taking. In the second risk position (Clusters 2 and 4), they used an additive integration rule for risk judgment while they used a disjunctive integration rule for risk taking. In the third risk position (cluster 3), they used an additive integration rule for both risk judgment and risk taking. In each risk position, confidence in the three antecedent factors (environment, team, and self) negatively affected risk judgment and positively affected risk taking. We found the compositions of the clusters to be related to the participants' sex, and we discuss various advantages of applying information integration for mountain hiking practitioners and promoters.