The measurement of place attachment: Personal, community, and environmental connections

By Christopher M. Raymond, Gregory Brown, Delene Weber. 2010

970 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Place attachment has been researched extensively in the social and behavioural sciences over the past two decades. However, it is challenging for researchers to assimilate the mixed messages presented in the place attachment literature and to understand the multiple place attachment terms. In this study, a four-dimensional model of rural landholder attachments to their natural resource management region was conceptually and empirically developed with the aim of developing an integrated approach to the measurement of place attachment that clearly distinguishes between different elements of place scholarship. A 29-item place attachment scale with the dimensions of place identity, place dependence, nature bonding, and social bonding was tested on a random sample of rural landholders in the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia (N = 320). The majority of respondents were male (69.3%) and the average age was 59 years. The scale was reduced to 20-items and then administered simultaneously and in the same response format to rural landholders in two other areas of South Australia: the Northern and Yorke region (N = 664) and South Australian Murray-Darling Basin region (N = 659). In both studies, the majority of respondents were male (85%) and the average age was 55 years. Exploratory factor and reliability analyses of Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges and Northern and Yorke datasets produced a five-dimensional model of place attachment with high reliabilities. Social bonding divided into the constructs of family bonding and friend bonding. The refined five-dimensional model was then examined for convergent validity, with moderate but significant correlations found between individual attachment constructs and dependent variables expected to be related to the construct, such as place identity and length of residence, and nature bonding and time currently spent in nature. We used confirmatory factor analysis to test the goodness-of-fit of the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin (SAMDB) dataset to the proposed five-dimensional model and then compared its fit to the traditional two-dimensional model of place identity and place dependence. The five-dimensional model provided moderate fit for the SAMDB data. We conclude with a discussion of the validity and reliability of the five-dimensional model and its future role in place attachment research.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de0e7e2464d2cc6699151cda3c2f1d3a56338002

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Citations in the corpus

The mediating role of place attachment between nature connectedness and human well-being: perspectives from Japan (2019, background): “(2010) where place attachment is measured beyond just place dependence and identity, and social bonding or community attachment, bonding with surrounding nature, and family bonding are found to be equally important to assess an individual’s place attachment (Raymond et al. 2010).”
Destination Fascination and Destination Loyalty: Subjective Well-Being and Destination Attachment as Mediators (2020, background): “…attachment, provide important empirical evidence to add to place relationship literature in environmental psychology regarding ways place experience influences individuals intrinsically (Scannell and Gifford 2017) and extrinsically (Raymond, Brown, and Weber 2010; Scannell and Gifford 2010).”
Connectedness as a Core Conservation Concern: An Interdisciplinary Review of Theory and a Call for Practice (2014, background): “, inner happiness, peace-of-mind, presence-ofbeing, heightened attention and awareness, love and forgiveness, aliveness and vitality, curiosity and inquisitiveness, physical and mental resilience, generosity and gratitude, empathy and feelings of belonging, relatedness, and oneness [32, 97, 100, 101”
The moderating effect of place attachment on the relationship between festival quality and behavioral intentions (2017, background): “Raymond, Brown, and Weber (2010) expanded research on the measurement of PA and included the measures related to personal, community, and environmental connections.”
Predictors of Pro-Environmental Behavior in Rural American Communities (2015, background): “Raymond et al. (2010) developed a model that indicates that nature bonding, social strong attachment, and physical and social characteristics of place all have important roles to play in place identity and dependence.”