This study recognises three broad approaches to place theory,
which often appear to be incompatible. Phenomenological and
humanistic approaches explore the deeper significance of place to
human existence and the subjective, emotional quality of people’s
relationship to places. This tradition has been criticised by positivistic
place researchers for the lack of an empirical basis, and by social place theorists as politically regressive in ignoring the social
forces by which the meaning of place is contested (Creswell, 2004).
A second tradition, which Patterson and Williams (2005) name
psychometrics, explores the relationship between the physical environment
and the human psyche by attributing numeric measures to
psychosocial phenomena such as place attachment and then analysing
this data using quantitative techniques. Grounded in the epistemology
of scientific empiricism, this tradition has been criticised for
reducing holistic phenomena to a mechanistic set of interacting
objective elements, and failing to provide any account of the subjective
aspects of the human experience of place (Malpas, 1999). The
third tradition, social constructivism, while happy to embrace
subjectivity, sees it as a socially constructed phenomenon (Massey,
1994). Constructivist place theorists have been criticised for seeking
to explain place solely in terms of the social processes and failing to
account for the embodied, individuated nature of subjective experience
and the link that the body creates between subjectivity and the
objective material world (Malpas, 1999). Following Patterson and
Williams (2005), this study recognises that a broad discussion of the
phenomenon of place attachment will drawon contributions to place
literature from each of these research approaches.