人與環境的關係為一種抽象的概念,此概念經常被用來解釋在地社群(local community)在環境資源利用上不同的行為模式。地方(或環境)是一種透過個人化、群體化以及一連串文化過程的經驗場所;在此之際,人與環境關係的論述發展出「地方感」(sense of place)、「地方依附」(place attachment)及「社區依附」(community attachment)等相關概念,用以說明人與環境的聯結狀態。然而,這些類似的概念,在各研究領域中尚未有整合性的界定與釐清,其內涵與應用仍存有許多模糊地帶。因此,本文係以「地方感」、「地方依附」與「社區依附」三項環境相關領域中常見的研究變數,針對其理論基礎、定義、研究變數與設計進行探討,藉由相關文獻之分析對三者加以釐清,指陳其間相似與相異之處,並提出三者在研究應用上的建議。 本文綜合結果發現,「地方感」在相關研究中,多應用於人與環境關係的現象詮釋,研究以質性設計居多;「地方依附」及「社區依附」則多採實證設計,常以具體、量性方式呈現結果;惟「地方依附」之內涵著重於「自然環境」及「社會環境」兩面向與人們的交互關係,而「社區依附」則較偏重「社會環境」單一面向對人們的影響。
The relationships between people and the environment are abstract. These relationships are often transformed to explain people's behavioral patterns responding to the issues of environmental management in their local communities. Place (or the environment) is recognized as a space shaped by the interactive experiences through individual, collective, and socio-cultural processes at a given area. In the meanwhile, the theoretical concepts of 'sense of place', 'place attachment', and 'community attachment' have developed to describe such experiences. However, those concepts in some way look similar and have not been well defined within the arena of social research. It, thus, reveals that their contexts and applications in the different dimensions of research become ambiguous. Therefore, this paper reviewed a significant amount of the literature related to the concepts of 'sense of place', 'place attachment', and 'community attachment', as well as further tried to clarify the similarity and distinction among them through a better understanding on their theoretical backgrounds, definitions, research design, and implications. And, some suggestions to the future applications were provided. In summary, this paper concluded that the concept of 'sense of place' was often applied in describing the phenomena about the relationships between people and the environment, and therefore its research design was focused more on qualitative than quantitative. In turn, 'place attachment' and 'community attachment' were mostly used in the empirical research for a concrete and quantitative result. Moreover, an obvious distinction was found between the contexts of 'place attachment' and 'community attachment'. That is, 'place attachment' was emphasized on two dimensions of the environment (natural and social), and 'community attachment' was taken only one dimension-'social environment'-into its account for addressing the relationships between people and the environment.