Individual Experiential Components of Sense of Place
Regardless of one’s position on whether biological, innate, or evolutionary factors
should be included in place attachment, it is clear that they provide only one part of
the picture (Herzog and Kutzli 2002). Other research establishes a more complex
interaction among causes, an interaction arising from personal and sociocultural
factors. That is, sense of place can arise from uniquely individual as well as shared
social processes. The relative emphasis placed on personal versus sociocultural
processes appears to relate to the researcher’s discipline (Gustafson 2001). As
Stokowski (2002) and Williams (2002) pointed out, in natural resources generally,
and recreation specifically, the primary emphasis has been on the individual as the
unit of analysis, and little work has been done on how meanings come to be shared
within groups. Thus, sense of place studies in recreation and tourism tend to look at
individual cognition, affect, and behavior. This is probably indicative of the preponderance
of psychologically trained researchers in the field as well as the ease of
studying individuals as opposed to groups.