关键词: 场所依赖, 维度, 节事场所, 扎根理论, 2011西安世界园艺博览会

Abstract:

Place attachment is a hot topic in place study which is defined as an individual’s cognitive or emotional connection to a particular setting or milieu, which attracts a great concern of researchers in the field of human geography, urban sociology, community science, environmental psychology, and behavioral science. However, place attachment study is seldom related to event venue. A literature review shows that most researchers treated event as an attribute of event host community to study the place attachment between people and host community, but paid little attention to event venue itself. As an inductive research approach, grounded theory is appropriate for situations where no pre-existing theory exists, which indicates its usefulness for the exploratory study on place attachment in event venue. The primary purpose of this study is to document the meanings event-goers attach to a specific event venue. If those meanings are known, managers can more effectively plan for the management of venue deemed to be special by their constituents. As an exploratory research, the International Horticultural Exposition, 2011, Xi'an (Expo 2011 Xi'an, China) is taken as a case, and first-hand data are collected from observation and interviews. The task of observation and interviews is to find out what factors in venue significantly affect the cognition and emotion of event-goers. Interviewees were asked to respond to a series of instructions regarding the venue of Expo 2011 Xi'an, China. The instructions are as follows: 1) describing in a few sentences what the venue is like—for example, what the venue looks, sounds, smells, or feels like, important features presented, and so on; 2) describing the thoughts, feelings, memories, and associations that come to mind when they think about this venue; 3) why this venue is important or special to them. To ensure diversity in types of event-goers in levels of experience, a systematic sampling strategy is employed. On-site sampling is divided into six days (four week days and two weekend days) from June 5 through July 20, 2011. A total of 21 respondents provid key messages for theory construction. Then the attribute of event venue attachment is analyzed from aspects of behaviors, attitudes and emotions of event-goers. The dimensions of place attachment in event venue based on grounded theory are refined and summarized through three analytic procedures: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. In open coding, the article extracts 68 native concepts in conceptual stage and forms 16 categories after categorization. The atudy establishes relationships among categories and forms four main categories in axial coding: person, society, place, and event (PSPE). Finally, a PSPE conceptual model of place attachment in event venue is contructed after selective coding. Person and society belong to human dimension. The perception object of people is a combination constituted by event and host community. Local factors and distinctiveness of event are integrated in the event venue. The article takes event dimension apart from place dimension, and further subdivides human dimension into person and society, which makes subjectivity and dominant nature of place attachment in event venue more clear and accurate.

Key words: place attachment, dimension, event venue, grounded theory, Expo 2011 Xi'an