A Visual Assessment of Children's and Environmental Educators' Urban Residential Preference Patterns.

Abstract

This study's major purpose was to gain a better underst and ing of children's urban perceptions and to determine how these perceptions compare with those of environmental educators. Participants, including 207 middle-school students and 92 environmental educators, rated 56 photographs of the urban residential environment both in terms of their familiarity and preference for such scenes. Based on students' preference ratings, a nonmetric, factor analytic method yielded 8 patterns that characterize the important categories of the urban environment. Three of these related to housing (Single-family Row Housing, Multiple-family Housing, and Tree-lined Streets). Five dealt with other aspects of the urban environment (Urban Parks, Retail City, Industrial/Factory Sites, Urban Mobility, and Run-down Urban). These patterns provide direct and concrete evidence that children share a common experience of place. They also indicate that preference ratings of photographs can effectively be used to identify children's environmental perceptions. These patterns were then used as the basis for further analyses of students' and environmental educators' familiarity and preference ratings. Although students were less familiar with all of the patterns than were the environmental educators, both groups tended to know the same urban places. Regarding preference, the two groups agreed only on what they did not like about the urban environment. Both disliked run-down deteriorated places. What the two groups did like bore little resemblance to one another. Students preferred the more urban patterns while environmental educators favored the more "natural" patterns. Students and environmental educators both had a positive and linear familiarity/preference relationship. The more familiar the pattern, the more it was preferred. This relationship, however, seems to be mediated by opportunities for involvement. Based on the study's findings I recommend that environmental curricula and programs should employ the user's environmental perceptions as the starting point for exploring the environment. Environment educators should be helping children underst and how the immediate environment functions in their lives. Research on children's environmental perceptions should continue and the findings incorporated into the environmental planning process. When doing such research, a visual data-gathering technique should be seriously considered.