An Exploration of Place Meanings among Residents in Central Wisconsin

Abstract

A survey was conducted with 685 residents as part of the Eastern Marathon County Lakes Project in central Wisconsin. Eleven lakes included in the project have undergone complete biological, ecological, and social assessments. Lake management plans along with education and outreach plans and programs will be developed based on these assessments. The mail survey, a component of the social assessment, aimed to gather information about the residents’ attitudes, behaviors, awareness of issues relating to the lakes, and attachment to the lakes. Understanding the residents’ place attachment to the lakes can provide insights to their involvement in their communities, and expectations in the lake management planning process and implementation (Manzo & Perkins, 2006). Place attachment is a complex concept composed of many dimensions to describe an individual’s relationship to a place. One dimension of place attachment is place meaning, or the values or meanings that an individual ascribes to a specific place. It is becoming clearer the importance of understanding place meanings in order to better understand place attachment. However, collecting this type of qualitative data is difficult to capture, and is often very specific to the setting and context. One objective of this study was to test the dimensional structure, validity, and transferability of a place meanings scale developed by Davenport, Baker, Leahy, & Anderson (2010). The place meanings scale was then further tested to see if any differences existed between lakefront property owners and non-lakefront property owners in the level of meanings assigned to the lakes; in addition, to testing if any relationships existed between place meanings and specific property characteristics such as year round resident versus seasonal resident, and size of property. The mail survey received a response rate of 44% (296). Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to see how the place meanings scale held up against the resident population. The exploratory factor analysis confirmed the dimensional structure and overall, the place meanings scale proved to be well-developed. Independent t-test was used to determine if any significant differences existed between lakefront and non-lakefront property owners. The analysis revealed that lakefront property owners assigned a higher level of meaning to three out of the five place meaning domains. Further linear regression analyses revealed that although there is a positive correlation between year-round residents versus seasonal residents and three of the place meaning domains, the correlation is weak and only explains 8% of the total variance. The same is true for size of property and the place meaning domains except the correlation is negative and only explains 12% of the total variance. Therefore, as size of property increased, place meaning decreased. This study demonstrated that a previously developed place meanings scale can be used on a different population in a different setting. However, when using the scale to determine if any relationships existed between other study variables the results while significant, do not have a strong influence on the meanings the residents assign to the lakes.