The Quality of Recreational Facilities Evaluation in Golestan Province Parks Based on (Gaps) Model

The purpose of this study was to quality of recreational facilities evaluation in Golestan province parks with condition, maintenance and safety dimension based on Gaps model. As a result, a questionnaire (Marlo et al. 2004) was distributed among 180 park users, 21 management and 27 employees. In this way, park users must represent their perception and expectations from park but manager and employees should represent their perceptions from user's expectations. In this study, the numbers of 21 parks were selected among total number of parks in the Golestan province in 15 cities according to Simple random sampling. The Result showed that there were significant differences between perception and expectations of park users in every three dimensions, in the other word, there are gaps between perception and expectations in the users park. On the other hand, there were significant differences between employees and park users only in safety dimension; therefore there was one gap in the safety dimension between employees and park users. There was significant difference between management and park users according to the condition and safety dimensions. In other words, a gap was indicated in the condition and safety dimensions between manager’s perceptions from park users expectation and park users expectations. The findings suggest that there were no significant differences between managements and employees perception from expectations of park users, as a result, there is no gaps between perception of managers and employees from expectation of park users. Although in all dimension (condition, maintenance and safety dimension) there was significant difference in between employee's perception and expectations from quality of the recreational-sport spaces in Golestan province parks, however, fortunately, there was no significant difference in managements and employees perception from real expectations of park users.