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