Despite place attachment's prominence within the environmental psychology literature, the scales and items used to measure place attachment vary significantly, hindering the ability of researchers to ...rally behind a standard measure. These types of discrepancies hamper the ability of researchers to directly compare findings across communities and conduct metanalyses on the antecedents and outcomes of place attachment. Furthermore, scales consisting of more than three items may unnecessarily burden respondents, thus impeding opportunities to add new constructs to surveys so that the precursors and outcomes of place attachment can be better understood. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to present and test the cross-cultural reliability and validity of an Abbreviated Place Attachment Scale (APAS) (i.e., three items for place identity and three items for place dependence) across seven samples spanning five data collections and four countries (United States, Cape Verde, Nigeria and Poland) involving residents and visitors. Confirmatory factor analysis reveals that the abbreviated scales perform just as well as their extended parents, and the multi-group confirmatory factor analysis reveals full measurement invariance demonstrating that the APAS is equivalent across cultures. Based on these results, the APAS should be given full attention by place attachment researchers seeking to expand the literature on the understanding of how people connect to places and the implications that these connections have on other important constructs such as quality of life, support for tourism, and place-based conservation efforts or individual environmental behaviors.
•Measures of place attachment vary significantly hindering comparing results.•Abbreviated 6-item measure of place attachment compared to previous 12-item measure.•APAS′ psychometric properties found to be as good or better than extended scale's.•Cross-cultural reliability and validity of APAS found across multiple countries.•APAS provides researchers with more room to include other constructs in survey.
This paper reviews research in place attachment and organizes the material into three sections: research, method, and theory. A review of several hundred empirical and theoretical papers and chapters ...reveals that despite mobility and globalization processes, place continues to be an object of strong attachments. The main message of the paper is that of the three components of the tripartite model of place attachment (
Scannell & Gifford, 2010a), the Person component has attracted disproportionately more attention than the Place and Process components, and that this emphasis on individual differences probably has inhibited the development of a theory of place attachment. Suggestions are offered for theoretical sources that might help to fill the gaps, including theories of social capital, environmental aesthetics, phenomenological laws of order, attachment, and meaning-making processes that stem from movements and time-space routines.
►Despite mobility and globalization processes, place continues to be an object of strong attachments. ►Of the three components of the tripartite model of place attachment, the Person component has attracted disproportionately more attention than the Place and Process components. ►Future theories of place attachment should draw from theories of social capital, environmental aesthetics, phenomenological laws of order, attachment theories, and theories of meaning-making processes through movements and time-space routines.
•One of the first quantitative studies assessing the effectiveness of place branding.•Physical place brand communication affects attracting target groups positively.•WOM place brand communication ...affects attracting target groups positively.•Traditional place brand communication has no effect on attracting target groups.•No differences found between the effects on attracting residents and visitors.
The study presented in this paper is one of the first quantitative, empirical studies addressing the effectiveness of place branding. This paper assesses whether three different strategies for place brand communication have a positive effect on attracting residents and visitors. The expectation is that this effect is mediated by the place brand image. In order to test the conceptual model that explains these relationships, data was gathered from a nationwide survey of Dutch place marketing professionals and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The empirical analysis shows that both physical place brand communication and word-of-mouth place brand communication have similar positive effects, mediated by the place brand image, on attracting both residents and visitors. There is no evidence that the effects were significantly different for attracting residents and visitors. Finally, traditional place brand communication has neither a direct effect on the place brand image nor a mediated effect by the place brand image on the attraction of residents and visitors.
In depopulating rural areas, one of the main issues is how to deal with the decline of local facilities such as schools, post-offices and shops. It is often feared that closure of a local facility ...will negatively affect the accessibility of that service and the liveability of the village. This paper examines how villagers experience the loss of a small local supermarket. Building on the concept of sense of place, we examine how people's attitude towards place-change relates to the functional, social, symbolic and emotional meanings a supermarket can have for individuals and for a community. A survey (n = 312) was conducted shortly before the closure of the supermarket in Ulrum, a depopulating village in the rural North of the Netherlands. The results show that negative evaluation of closure can be explained by individual emotional attachment to the supermarket and by the general symbolic value of a supermarket for a village. Contradictory to popular belief, perceptions of decreasing accessibility or diminishing liveability do not exemplify why many residents react negatively to the closure of the supermarket. In the Dutch rural context, access is only an issue for a relatively small group of people consisting mostly of elderly and less mobile citizens, while large groups of villagers may react negatively to closure of rural facilities. We propose that in different international contexts people may experience senses of loss and can react negatively to facility-decline due to the social, symbolic and emotional meaning of rural facilities.
•This paper examines how villagers experience the closure of the local supermarket.•people's attitude towards place-change relates to dimensions of sense of place.•place meanings can help to understand negative evaluations and reactions.•Lack of access is not the main reason for negative reactions.•Significant were: individual emotional attachment general symbolic value.
Abstract Research on workplace bullying, which has just recently passed the 20 year mark, has grown significantly over this duration of time. We provide an extensive review of the extant literature, ...with a focus on the antecedents and consequences of workplace bullying. We organize our review of the extant literature by level of analysis, which allows us to understand workplace bullying from each major level of analysis, while simultaneously identifying those levels at which research has been sparse. We then develop a conceptual model based on our review that similarly depicts theoretical and/or empirical findings from the extant literature, but in a succinct manner. Based on our review and conceptual model, we identify and highlight a number of key avenues for future research that will help extend the current workplace bullying literature.
Changes of residence are common in contemporary Western societies. Traditional connections to birthplaces, home towns and countries are broken as people relocate and migrate, yet where they live ...remains significant to people’s identity and stories of who they are. This book investigates the continuing importance of place for women’s identities, employing a theoretical and empirical approach based on previous work in narrative and discursive psychology.
Through an analysis of women’s talk, the book examines how commonsense meanings shape and limit people’s identity-work to establish a connection to place. It argues that talk about place, and especially place of residence, enables a complex positioning of self and others in which identities of gender, class and national identity intersect. It shows how a speaker’s multiple interpretations of where she lives remain central to her life narrative, and to her fragile and idealized definition of ‘home’ as the place in which she may position herself positively.
Narratives of Identity and Place presents a unique and valuable integration of the popular methods of narrative and discourse analysis, compellingly demonstrating the value of these approaches for research on identity.
•Clarification work on several relation-to-place concepts.•Proposition of a theoretical framework for a spatial approach of sense of place.•Focus on the power of place to understand place attachments ...and meanings.•Test of the framework on multiple cases enabling comparative analyses of sense of place.•Proposition of schematic representations of place attachments and place meanings.
This contribution to a spatial theory of sense of place is an invitation to seek a better understanding of the importance of physical and concrete places in dynamic territorial attachments and meanings. The objective is to build a theoretical and methodological framework embracing a spatial approach to relations with place, and of testing it on different territories. From 130 individual interviews conducted in four rural areas, this article provides four main scientific insights: (1) a theoretical input through clarification and classification of seven concepts involved in the interactions between people and places; (2) a framework proposition in order to highlight the important role of place in defining sense of place; (3) an empirical input, with a comparative multiple case analysis; and (4) schematic representations of place attachment (based on place dependence and place identity) and place meaning (based on liked, disliked and notorious entities). Such results may be of interest to both land-use planners, in order to match facilities to affinities, and to inhabitants themselves, as tools for dialog.
•Place attachment (PA) influences pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) moderately.•The direct effect of PA on PEB is larger in collectivist vs. individualist cultures.•The effect of PA on PEB is larger ...among tourists vs. residents.•The general measure of PA produces a larger effect size than the specific measure.•Place-specific measure of PEB produces a larger effect size than non-place specific one.
Place attachment has been identified as a key construct that can explain pro-environmental behaviour. However, the precise strength of its effect remains undocumented. The aim of this article is to quantify the effects of place attachment on pro-environmental behaviour by means of a meta-analysis and to examine the contextual factors that may explain the variations in the effect sizes reported in previous research. Our results show that, first, the overall effect of place attachment on pro-environmental behaviour is positive, and the strength of the effect is moderate. Second, the effect is larger in collectivist vs. individualist cultures. Third, the effect also depends on the type of place user and is larger for tourists vs. local residents. Fourth, the general measure of place attachment produces a larger effect size than measures focusing on one of its dimensions. Finally, place-specific measures of pro-environmental behaviour produce a larger effect size than non-place-specific ones.
While sense of place has been increasingly used in planning literature over the last five decades, its conceptualisation varies by discipline and theoretical orientation, with disjointed elements. ...This study develops a three-theme conceptual framework articulating individual-community-place interrelationships by critically reviewing the literature on sense of place and place-based constructs of attachment, identity, and satisfaction. Theorising the interactions in-between contributes to theoretical debates on sense of place and developing conceptual clarity to understand the planning context, processes, and outcomes, informing decision- and policy-making. It also facilitates the analysis and synthesis of complex narratives in qualitative studies of people-place relations.
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