Place Attachment and Community Attachment: A Primer Grounded in the Lived Experience of a Community Sociologist

Abstract

Abstract On the surface, the constructs of place attachment and community attachment appear to be quite similar; however, there are substantial differences between the multidisciplinary place literature and community sociology literature it comes from. For scholars trained in a relatively single-disciplinary area such as community sociology, the immensity and complexity of place literature can be difficult to navigate. This article is a primer on these two constructs, written from the perspective of a community sociologist. To give context to place attachment, an overview of the place literature is presented, including brief descriptions of various strands of place scholarship, along with the primary debates within the scholarship. Place attachment and related place concepts are introduced, followed by a brief review of the work on community attachment seen in community sociology. After contrasting the two, the overlap between constructs is discussed. The reader is left with suggestions for future work. Keywords: community attachmentcommunity sociologyplaceplace attachmentsense of place I am grateful to Rick Krannich, Linda Kruger, Matt Carroll, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and encouragement on earlier drafts. I am also indebted to Dan Williams, Rich Stedman, and Tom Beckley for their assistance in helping me sort out the place literature. Notes I thank Matt Carroll and an anonymous reviewer in particular for this encouragement. Considering the enormity of the place literature, this essay can only provide a relatively brief review. A more complete review can be found in Farnum, Hall, and Kruger (Citation2005). For example, sociology, psychology, and geography, as well as anthropology, economics, political science, history, social policy, planning, landscape architecture, and other disciplinary areas. Academic departments include, for example, Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management; Environment and Society; Natural Resources Science and Management; Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology; etc. This work has included developing a scale for the place attachment construct, testing the scale, its refinement, further testing and refinement across multiple data sets, and eventually a meta-analysis across 10 data sets. Since an interactionist perspective maintains that meaning is socially created through social interactions, and one of the central concerns within place literature is with place meanings, I include interactionist works with this body of social constructionist scholarship. I use "paradigm" here following Patterson and Williams (Citation2005), who present a framework for differing approaches to research. At the level of scientific application, where theoretical concepts are developed and tested empirically, they refer to research programs, typically organized within a discipline. They link research programs to paradigms, the source of "normative philosophical commitments" for the approach. "Paradigms often transcend disciplinary boundaries" (363). Worldviews inform paradigms. My use of "paradigm" is in this sense of a particular approach informing multiple research programs, at a level that transcends disciplines. An example within place literature would be the paradigm of phenomenology, which has been used by geographers, psychologists, and sociologists. In this evolutionary process, an initial stage of energetic enthusiasm and apparent consensus about a topic with emergent salience erodes as the topical work achieves increasing breadth and depth. A second stage brings increased rigor and precision, however, the increasing breadth brings more scattered representations and widely varying descriptions and explanations of the phenomenon in question. The authors see their book as an attempt to usher in the second stage. A third stage consists of "development of systematic theoretical positions and clearly delineated programs of research and application of knowledge to the solution of practical problems" (Low and Altman Citation1992, 3). Patterson and Williams illustrate the language differences well with a discussion of contrasting uses of the word "particularistic" within these debates (Citation2005, 370–371). Place identity has also been used to describe a more reciprocal identity process. Here, individuals and groups contribute to and shape the identity of places while the places in turn help shape the identities of these same people (e.g., Petrzelka Citation2004). The place attachment construct has been used to examine micro places, such as buildings (e.g., Milligan Citation1998) or rooms within buildings (e.g., Mazumdar and Mazumdar Citation1993), large places like national parks or other public lands (e.g., Mitchell et al. Citation1993; Warzecha et al. Citation2000), and places in between, like neighborhoods (e.g., Brown et al. Citation2003). Kasarda and Janowitz (Citation1974) measured community attachment with three questions: to what degree residents felt "at home" in their community; how interested they were in knowing what goes on in their community; and how sorry or pleased they would be to leave if for some reason they had to move away from their community (331). Other positive predictors include income/employment class (e.g., Goudy Citation1990; Kasarda and Janowitz Citation1974) and religious participation (e.g., Liu et al. Citation1998; Stinner et al. Citation1990); age has been inconsistent, with some studies finding a linear relationship (e.g., Goudy Citation1990; Theodori and Luloff Citation2000), while in others the relationship is curvilinear (e.g., Kasarda and Janowitz Citation1974). Gender has been tested repeatedly, but the findings have been mixed. This is not to say that the broader community sociology literature is this unified; however a majority of the community attachment scholarship is.