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Concepts and Measures of Place Meanings and Attachment

Concepts such as home and community imply an enduring and deeply emotional relationship to a place and people often form similar bonds with specific sites on public forests and wildlands. These bonds may grow simply from frequent use of a particular place on a forest or because some place has come to symbolize something important about a person's identity. With increasing public interest and involvement in natural resource decision making, land managing agencies need to develop measures and assessments of these emotional and symbolic meanings and attachments. Such assessments are particularly relevant in situations where there is a wide divergence of values and perspectives among stakeholders regarding the appropriate management. Research on social-symbolic meanings is advancing our understanding of how recreation activity participation contributes to psychological well-being; how attachments to places contribute to a sense of meaning, identity, and community; how attachments vary across culture and affect local management regimes; and how place meanings and attachments affect natural resource conflicts. A key outcome of this work has been the development of standardized questionnaire instruments designed to measure place attachment among recreation site visitors and community residents. These scales allow investigators to describe and quantify the nature and depth of meanings and attachments people have for any place or landscape at a range of geographic scales from campsite to community, and identify stakeholder groups with differing degrees and forms of attachment that may form the underlying basis of conflict between competing groups over natural resource management decisions. Place attachment is being used by land mangers to enhance scenic quality assessments, assist recreation managers with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hydropower re-licensing process, and map public values in fuel treatment planning.

Measuring Place Attachment: Notes and Sample Questions

Notes on Measuring Recreational Place Attachment Measurement (1.8 MB PDF file)

Daniel R. Williams
September, 2000

Example Survey Questions for Measuring Place Attachment

See notes on measurement (above) for explanations and analysis of survey questions.

• Cohutta Wilderness Survey (292 KB PDF file)
• Hayward Lakes Area Seasonal Homeowner Survey (270 KB PDF file)
• Mt. Rogers Nat'l Recreation Area Survey (283 KB)
• Mt.Rogers Region Survey of Community Residents (337 KB PDF file)
• Shenendoah National Park Visitor Survey (345 KB PDF file)

Selected Publications

• Williams, D. R. (in press). Pluralities of place: A user's guide to place concepts, theories, and philosophies in natural resource management. In Kruger, L., and Hall, T. (eds.), Sense of Place in Recreation and Tourism Management (PNW-GTR-xxx) Portland , OR : USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station.

• Patterson, M. E., & Williams, D. R. (2005). Maintaining research traditions on place: Diversity of thought and scientific progress. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 361-380.
  (349 KB PDF file)

• Backlund, E., & Williams, D. R. (2004). A quantitative synthesis of place attachment research: Investigating past experience and place attachment. In J. Murdy (comp.) Proceedings of the 2003 Northeast Recreation Research Symposium (GTR-NE-314, pp. 320-325). Newtown Square, PA : USDA Forest Service, Northeast Research Station.

• Williams, D. R. (2004). Place-identity. In J. Jenkins and J. Pigram (eds.). Encyclopedia of leisure and outdoor recreation (pp. 367-368). London: Routledge.

• Williams, D. R., & Vaske, J. J. (2003). The measurement of place attachment: Validity and generalizability of a psychometric approach. Forest Science, 49(6), 830-840.

• Kaltenborn, B. P., & Williams, D. R. (2002). The meaning of place: Tourists' versus locals' attachment to Femundsmarka National Park. Norwegian Journal of Geography, 56(3), 189-198.

• Williams, D. R., Riden, C., McDonald, C., & Uysal, M. (1995). Community Attachment, regional identity, and resident attitudes towards tourism. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Travel and Tourism Research Association (pp. 424-431). June 10-13, Acapulco , Mexico.

• Williams, D. R., & Carr, D. S. (1993). The sociocultural meaning of outdoor recreation places. In A. Ewert, D. Chavez, & A. Magill (Eds.) Culture, Conflict and Communication in the Wildland-Urban Interface , (pp. 209-219), Boulder , CO: Westview Press.

• Williams, D. R., Patterson, M. E., Roggenbuck, J. W., & Watson, A. E. (1992). Beyond the commodity metaphor: Examining emotional and symbolic attachment to place. Leisure Sciences, 14 , 29-46.

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