The following is an excerpt I received from an email yesterday:

Since we last spoke, our research team has made some changes in our approach to the study and will not be surveying clubs at this time.

As I mentioned in our initial conversation, our primary source of survey respondents for the study will come from the DNR’s database of people who registered their ORVs in Michigan. Because we weren’t sure how thorough that list would be until we received it, our back-up plan was to consider using ORV club members for our study. However, now that we have the list from the DNR, we’ve realized it’s a better fit for this particular study than surveying clubs for the following reasons:

· It includes over 100,000 names, all with consistent contact information broken out by county (we want to make sure we get good representation from certain counties and out of state areas we think people would most likely travel from to a park in SE Michigan).

· It includes very casual ORV users as well as more invested ones (people who join clubs are presumably more invested in ORV use than those who aren’t)

· From a research methods perspective, it’s better to draw a sample from one population (in this case registered ORV users) rather than from multiple populations (each of the clubs that were willing to participate).

· We were concerned about the chance of someone getting the survey twice (once from the club and once from the DNR list).

There is a chance that later this spring or summer, we will want to conduct a follow-up study to this one with club members.