Research Methods for Environmental Psychology

Robert Gifford

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118795385, 9781118795330
• eBook ISBN: 9781118795453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Covering the full spectrum of methodology, the timely and indispensible Research Methods for Environmental surveys the research and application methods for studying, changing, and improving human attitudes, behaviour and well-being in relation to the physical environment.

• The first new book covering research methods in environmental psychology in over 25 years. Brings the subject completely up-to-date with coverage of the latest methodology in the field
• The level of public concern over the impact of the environment on humans is high, making this book timely and of real interest to a fast growing discipline
• Comprehensively surveys the research and application methods for studying, changing, and improving human attitudes, behavior, and well-being in relation to the physical environment
• Robert Gifford is internationally recognised as one of the leading individuals in this field, and the contributors include many of the major leaders in the discipline

1
Introduction: Environmental Psychology and its Methods

Robert Gifford

University of Victoria, BC, Canada

How did we get here? I don’t mean biologically; I mean to the point where we are sharing a book about how to do research in environmental psychology. You will have your story; here is mine. Like many others, I was initially drawn to psychology because of its potential to help people with emotional and cognitive difficulties. I entered graduate school as a student in clinical psychology, even though I had worked as an undergraduate assistant for a professor (Robert Sommer) who was curious about such things as how people tended to space themselves from others and whether one’s choice of study areas influenced academic performance. These studies were driven partly by pure curiosity about how humans operate in their daily environments, and partly by the goal of informing environmental design from the person outward rather than from the building inward. Put another way, these studies sought to discover fundamental principles of human behavior, which could then be translated into practice by talented designers, who would create people-centered optimal environments.

I slowly realized that I was more suited and more interested in these questions and goals than I was in being a clinical psychologist. At about the same time, in the late 1960s, what we had been doing acquired a name, environmental psychology.¹ In some senses, having a name makes something real, or at least more real. Activity becomes legitimized, recognized, and organized. After dropping out of graduate school (I also dropped out of kindergarten, but that is another story) and contemplating my future in a cabin on a remote island that had no electricity or running water, or even any furniture, I knew I had to be engaged in discovering the principles and aiding the practice as an environmental psychologist. I went back to graduate school, and here I am, 45 years later.

Why this personal story? Frankly, it is an attempt to connect with you, the reader, who also probably did not enter your post-secondary education with a ringing declaration that “I want to be an environmental psychologist!” Your story undoubtedly differs from mine in its details, but I suspect that in broad terms it is the same. At some point you discovered environmental psychology, you were intrigued, and here you are.

So, where is it exactly that you are? You may well have entered this big house through a variety of doors. Do you want to conduct fundamental research, that is to learn how humans interact with their physical environments (without any particular or immediate application to saving the planet or designing better buildings)? If so, welcome to the big house; this book has chapters for you. Do you want to understand how the physical environment impacts people in negative and positive ways? We have space in the big house for you, too. I know … you want to learn how and why people are damaging the only planet we have available to live on. Yes, of course, this big house has space for you, as well. All this book’s editor expects is that you respect and tolerate others in the house who have different goals.

Environmental psychology needs all of you, just as medicine needs fundamental biochemistry, knowledge about pathogens and paths to health, those whose practice focuses on the usual but important run of flu and fractures, and activist physicians who are willing to put their lives on the line by going to the front lines of the latest dangerous epidemic or war.

That is why the book has four protagonists, whom you will meet at the beginning of each chapter. I hope you will see a bit or a lot of yourself in one of these characters. They are all just now entering graduate school. Maria, Ethan, Gabriel, and Annabelle share a house and are friends who met through school or work. All four happen to be dedicated to environmental psychology, but they vary in their interests within the field and in their backgrounds.

Maria has a undergraduate degree in psychology, with a minor in neuroscience. She believes that knowledge advances best when strong and clear scientific methods are employed. She feels most comfortable in the laboratory, but she is willing to leave the lab to work on problems as long as the issue can be worked on with scientific methods. Privately, she is skeptical about the validity of field studies.

Ethan also has an undergraduate degree in psychology, but his minor was in sociology. He prefers to study environmental issues in the community, through surveys, interviews, and talking to community members. He believes that lab studies have their place, but ecological validity trumps the value of the confined laboratory. He is not so private about his belief that you can’t be sure of any finding that isn’t verified in the community. He belongs to three activist organizations.

Gabriel’s undergraduate degree was in geography. He spent a year in architecture school before realizing that he was more interested in the human dimensions of the built environment. Currently, he has a co-op position with the regional government; he is taking a term off from graduate school, but will return next term. Every day he hears from co-workers about how academics are OK, but they take far too long to conduct studies, and are unrealistic about policy, politics, and the application of research to the real world. Although he is a scientist at heart, he largely agrees with them. He is trying hard to bridge the science–policy gap.

Annabelle did her undergraduate degree in psychology, but she took as many courses about people with problems as she could; if she were not primarily interested in environmental psychology, she would be a clinical psychologist or social worker. Her minor was in environmental studies and she gets out into nature almost every weekend. Annabelle sees research more as a way to solve immediate problems for people. She is most comfortable with qualitative approaches, with research that has an immediate impact, and with research that sooner or later will help people overcome their personal difficulties.

As another way to connect the graduate student experience with this book, I invited some of my own advanced students to co-write the chapters with established, senior, well-published co-authors. The goal was to maximize the chances that each chapter reflected (a) the ways and means that people who are just entering environmental psychology understand it, and (b) the great experience that the senior authors possess. I hope that comes through as you read the chapters.

Which chapters? I thought you never would ask! OK, here is the preview. We cannot be a credible force in the world, even as activists, if we do not have a firm foundation in basic research. Without it we are simply … I was going to use a common phrase that involves “… the wind,” but let’s change that to “an ignored voice, devoid of authority.” So Chapter 2, by Reuven Sussman, describes what I call Step One: observing what actually occurs in an environmental context. We should “just watch” first, then try to figure out what is going on and how to change it. But “just watching” requires more special skills than one might think. So Reuven informally calls it “You Can Observe A Lot Just by Watching,” a cute title with an important theme. Whether you are studying how the built environment affects the behavior of its occupants or whether people recycle resources into the correct receptacles, a very important first step is to simply watch people, without trying to change or influence them. The design and execution of an intervention to change people or the environment can be greatly successful and useful (or not!), depending on observations about what people are actually doing now. Haste in conducting an intervention might, for example, involve much effort at changing a behavior that is already common (but you did not know that), or changing one that is so resistant to change that the planned intervention simply will not be effective. Just watching people will help to shape the nature of your study, and help to avoid you wasting much time and effort on a research design that is doomed to failure because you assumed what was going on in the setting but, sadly, you were wrong.

Chapter 3, by Cheuk Fan Ng, focuses on three special kinds of watching. Behavior mapping is about “adding up” the paths and activities of many people who use or visit a particular setting. Behavior tracking is doing the same for specific individuals in the setting, often those who have a special relationship with that setting. Observing physical traces is the “archeological” form of observation in environmental psychology. After many people have used a setting, they collectively leave traces: the wear on the floor, the impromptu signs put up, the path across the grass between buildings. This tells much about how the setting is being used.

Wokje Abrahamse, Linda Steg, and Wes Schultz contributed Chapter 4, all about the basics of moving beyond observation to actually conducting research in environmental psychology, with an emphasis on understanding human failings in our treatment of the environment. Some aspects and methods of research in environmental psychology are similar to those in other areas of psychology, but they focus on topics of interest in this big house. If you have taken a course called Research Methods in Psychology, these will be … let’s not say redundant; let’s say they will be refreshers. Who remembers everything about random assignment and statistics anyway? So Chapter 4 is like that. The basics, applied to environmental psychology.

Chapter 5, by Donald Hine, Christine Kormos, and Anthony Marks, reverts to the “often used in other fields” category. However, their topic, Survey and Interview Techniques, is highly customized for this big house, and includes some ideas and techniques that are not found or used in those other fields.

Chapter 6, by Amanda McIntyre and Taciano Milfont, is the book’s big-house take on the most commonly used method in all of psychology. However, no other area of psychology uses these measures, which have been developed over the lifetime of environmental psychology specifically to learn how people think about the physical environment. Need a tool for that? McIntyre and Milfont describe and discuss a whole toolbox of instruments for measuring each particular kind of attitude toward the environment … and if you think there is just one, you will be surprised. Selecting the most appropriate attitude measure for the hypothesis you wish to test is just as important as selecting the correct wrench for loosening a nut.

Not all methods use “objective” methods (actually, perhaps no method is fully objective anyway, but you know what I mean). In Chapter 7, David Seamon and Harneet Gill explain how to use qualitative approaches in environment-behavior research. The great value of this approach is that “the people speak, and in their own tongue.” What I mean by this is that in experiments, we researchers impose conditions on participants and then observe how they respond. Usually we don’t know what is going on in the “black box” of their minds, and that is a crucial part of learning about any person–environment interaction. Even if we conduct a survey or an interview, most of the time the person is restricted to answering the questions we ask; what if the important aspects of the person’s interaction with the environment is not among the questions we ask? We should often or even always try to “learn what is going on” before we rush into experiments and interventions. What are people in a particular environment of interest thinking and experiencing, in their own words, before we impose our own frames on that experience by asking questions of our own choice, or pressing them from our external positions without knowing how they experience their environments?

I vividly remember a study that Donald Hine and I conducted in which we asked participants to “think aloud” as they made decisions about allocating natural resources in a microworld (see below for a chapter on microworlds). We were quite surprised at some of the rationales we heard: in the whole history of experiments in that area, no researcher had thought to investigate these rationales, which were important to the people in our study who were making decisions. Without a qualitative approach, some of these rationales may never have come to light.

Chapter 8, by David Canter, explores the question: “how do different places fit together – or not – in people’s minds?” Which aspects of, say, restaurants or schools or cities, make them similar to or different from us? Canter explains several methods for assessing place constructs.

In Chapter 9, Daniel Montello will take you into the world of finding our way around environments. Cognition is a core psychological process, often studied in other areas of the discipline, but spatial cognition is a specialty of environmental psychology. Where would we be without it? Constantly lost, is where, which is why spatial cognition is so important. Because studying cognition itself is very difficult, Montello focuses on the observ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Observational Methods
• 3 Behavioral Mapping and Tracking
• 4 Research Designs for Environmental Issues
• 5 Agree to Disagree
• 6 Who Cares? Measuring Environmental Attitudes
• 7 Qualitative Approaches to Environment–Behavior Research
• 8 Revealing the Conceptual Systems of Places
• 9 Behavioral Methods for Spatial Cognition Research
• 10 Microworlds
• 11 Simulating Designed Environments
• 12 Planning the Built Environment
• 13 Did that Plan Work? Post-occupancy Evaluation
• 14 Action Research
• 15 Research Designs for Measuring the Effectiveness of Interventions
• 16 Applying Behavioral Science for Environmental Sustainability
• 17 Improving Human Functioning
• 18 Research and Design for Special Populations
• 19 Advanced Statistics for Environment-Behavior Research
• 20 Meta-analysis
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement