How Childhood Residency Impacts Emotional Response to the Environment
- Discipline
- City and Regional Planning
- Semester
- Autumn 2016
- Work Type
- Documents
- related to
- Hofmaster, Ashley
- faculty
- Nasar, Jack
- Description
- Research shows that life in rural and urban environments may lead to different impressions of the environments. Perhaps differences in childhood environments might affect the way people respond to the environment as adults. I hypothesize that people who grew up in a rural or urban community would differ in their emotional impressions of urban and rural environments. I hypothesize that people from urban areas will prefer urban images and people from rural places will prefer rural images. Using Qualtrics, I conducted on-line surveys of adults (18 to 25 years old) who grew up in either rural or urban areas. They saw four black and white photos of urban and four black and white photos of rural environments in a random order, and rated each on a seven-point scale for its comfort, activeness, and pleasantness. For each item, I used a represented-measure of analysis of variance with a group (urban or rural) as a within group factor. The groups may differ in ways that were not tested. The reactive responses, the realness of the study, and the limited set of stimuli are threats to validity. The result indicated some differences and some similarities in emotional appraisals across the two groups. People from rural areas tend to have preference over rural areas and people from urban areas tend to have preference of urban areas. This research had limitation in the sample size and only looking at people ages 18-25 from urban and rural population. If this research was to be continued, a larger sample would be collected and it would be expanded to people from suburbs and include suburban images. This research is beneficial to the theory of planning and environmental psychology. Appraisals of places are dynamic and evolutionary; they vary with what the experience of the individual.