People and Places: Variance Components of Environmental Preferences

Abstract

The distinction between people and places has been a recurring theme in environmental research, but explicit studies of this distinction are rare. This paper reports variance components analyses on random samples of both respondents and stimuli to address the question of the respective effect sizes for people and places on the criterion of preferences for environmental scenes. Independently replicated findings from scenes in two different cities suggest that people and places respectively account for about 10% and 40% of the population preference variance. Implications for multicultural design and research are discussed.