Content area
Abstract
The general interest in this study is with individuals' thoughts about their surroundings and the degree to which such thoughts reveal the "use" of environmental standards or prototypes. This interest has relevance because of its critical implications for the transactional and constructivist paradigms utilized to understand the more fundamental issue of person-environment-behavior relations. Some concerns related to this general interest include such issues as which settings "seem to require" a universal prototype and which a multiple prototype, and what importance can be attributed to subject-group differences in the attributes used in their environmental thoughts.
To examine these questions, it was necessary to acquire individuals' spontaneous and immediate thoughts about three different but commonly encountered environments. With written renditions of such thoughts as a base, this study: (1) transformed these written reports of thoughts about environments into a binary notation (i.e., 1 = mentions and 0 = nonmentions) so as to exemplify the "use" of attributes in these thoughts; (2) assessed the degree of association existing between patterns of attribute-use in environmental thoughts for all distinct pairs of subjects in a sample; (3) determined whether subjects fell into groups that were relatively homogeneous with respect to attribute-use in thoughts about an environment; (4) ascertained the degree to which resulting groups differed from one another in terms of attribute-use pattern; and, finally, (5) isolated the underlying meaning characterizing each group to provide a conceptual basis for such differences.
For each environment, several distinct subject-groups were identified according to schematized differences in attribute-use in environmental thoughts. A single attribute-use pattern for all subjects did not occur for any environment. Often, one group's attribute-pattern conveyed a different "sense of place" meaning than another group's. Such group differences in environmental thoughts appeared to be related to different notions about the prototypical attributes suitable for identifying members of a class of environments. Groups that utilized primarily inferential attributes provided evidence that subjects had indeed reported on their thoughts.
