Indexes of perceived residential environment quality and neighbourhood attachment in urban environments: a confirmation study on the city of Rome

This paper presents two instruments measuring the quality of the relationship that inhabitants have with their urban neighbourhoods. These instruments consist of 11 scales measuring the perceived environmental qualities of urban neighbourhoods and one scale measuring neighbourhood attachment. The 11 scales are included in four generative criteria as follows: three scales concern spatial aspects (i.e. architectural-planning space, organization and accessibility of space, green space); one concerns human aspects (i.e. people and social relations); four concern functional aspects (i.e. welfare, recreational, commercial, transport services); three concern contextual aspects (i.e. pace of life, environmental health, upkeep). The study objectives were: (a) to compare the structure and number of both indexes of perceived environmental quality and the neighbourhood attachment index with respect to the findings of a study (see [J. Environ. Psychol. 19 (1999) 331]) that used a previous version of these instruments; (b) to improve the psychometric qualities (i.e. internal consistency coefficients) of the used tools. The instruments have the form of a self-reported questionnaire which was administered to 312 residents in seven neighbourhoods (differing in various features) of a great urban context like the city of Rome. A series of Principal Component Analyses (PCA) was performed on the data. Results confirm the factorial structure of the scales, which include 19 perceived quality indexes (150 items total) and one neighbourhood attachment index (eight items). The scales show an increased level of reliability with respect to earlier studies.