Measuring place attachment with the Abbreviated Place Attachment Scale (APAS)

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Highlights

  • 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.

Abstract

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.

Section snippets

Introduction and concept overview

As interest in people-place relations have grown over the last 50 years (Di Masso et al., 2019; Lewicka, 2011), the concept of place attachment has firmly cemented itself as one of the most theoretically important concepts within the environmental psychology literature (Ariccio et al., 2020; Clarke, Murphy, & Lorenzoni, 2018; Gustafson, 2001; Scannell & Gifford, 2010, 2017; Van Riper et al., 2019). This is despite the fast-paced rise of globalization and hypermodernity that threaten the

Methods

To compare the psychometric properties of the proposed abbreviated three-item place identity and place dependence scales, seven analyses across five data collections, spanning four countries involving samples of residents and visitors were used (Table 1). These case studies were chosen to test the cross-cultural and cross-contextual validity and applicability of the abbreviated scales because each of them included a measure of place attachment adapted from Williams and Roggenbuck, (1989),

Model fit, construct validity, and content/face validity

Model fit, reliability, and validity of the proposed abbreviated three-item place identity and place dependence scales were assessed using CFA within SPSS's AMOS 27.0 package. In all seven analyses of the APASs, the model fit indicator of RMSEA improved or saw no change when compared to the larger scales (Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6, Table 7). For the model fit indicator of CFI, six out of the seven analyses were improved or saw no change, with the Osun Osogbo Festival resident

Discussion and conclusion

Given place attachment is one of the most ubiquitous constructs employed within the environmental psychology literature (Ariccio et al., 2020; Clarke et al., 2018; Di Masso et al., 2019; Lewicka, 2011; Nisa et al., 2020; Scannell & Gifford, 2017; Van Riper et al., 2019), this study sought to test the cross-cultural construct validity of an Abbreviated Place Attachment Scale (APAS) covering two of its most prominent dimensions, place identity and place dependence. The APAS comprises three items

Author credit statement

Bynum Boley: Conceptualization; Supervision, Project administration, Formal Analysis; Writing, Funding acquisition; Marianna Strzelecka: Conceptualization; Methodology; Data Curation; Writing; Emily Yeager: Data curation; Writing; Manuel Ribeiro: Formal Analysis; Data curation; Writing; Kayode Aleshinloye; Data curation; Writing; Kyle Woosnam: Editing, Supervision; Funding acquisition, Writing; Benjamin Mimbs: Data curation, Writing.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Tennessee Valley Authority Project Number AWD00008604; Award ID FP0012519; McIntire-Stennis project number is GEOZ0202-MS; Warnell School of Forestry – Gerald B and Charlotte Alexander Saunders Scholarship and the University of Georgia Interdisciplinary Research Grant.

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