Attitudes Toward Research in Landscape Architecture: A Study of the Discipline

Questionnaires were sent to 469 educators in North American departments of landscape architecture. Sixty-two percent of the educators returned the questionnaire. Items tapped concepts such as attitudes toward research, perceived rewards and penalties, perceptions of colleagues' attitudes, time management, and self-reported research behavior. As an empirical model for the prediction of research behavior, the study showed that positive attitudes, coupled with training in research methods, were most directly responsible for research productivity. Response distributions to individual items revealed five major obstacles to further development of a research component within landscape architecture. The obstacles are discussed and recommendations for overcoming them are offered.