The Scale Preference of the Residents' Sense of Place and its Factors

The students from Nanjing Agricultural University were enrolled as the subjects and data were acquired through a semi-structured questionnaire. With a combination of the qualitative and quantitative methods, data were analyzed and employed to understand the scale preference of the residents' place attachment and place identity under the present administrative division system. Furthermore, the difference of demographic variables in scale distributions of the two dimensions of sense of place (SOP) was examined and the impact of the formation mechanism of SOP on scale preference was discussed. The obtained conclusions are listed as follows. First, the scale distribution of the residents' place attachment is an inverted U-shaped curve in which the medium scales including the city and the county are most attached to while the larger scale of the province and the smaller scales such as the village and the town are much less attached to. The scale distribution of the residents' place identity is different in that the larger the scale, the more it is preferred by the subjects. Second, demographic factors including age, only-childhood, nationality, household registration, university major and length of time living in a dormitory before entering university significantly influence the residents' scale preference of SOP, either on one dimension or both. Third, as the subordinate concepts of SOP, place attachment and place identity both contain the three psychological aspects of feeling, cognition and behavior. In addition, both dimensions can be interpreted with the guiding principles of identity theory, i.e., distinctiveness, continuity, self-efficacy and self-esteem.