Place Attachment - Social Scale

What it measures

Measures the strength of a consumer's emotional bond to the people associated with a specific place, such as the regular patrons or employees of a retail or service setting. Captures the degree to which the person would feel distress at the prospect of losing access to the social community tied to that place, independently of any attachment to its physical features. Designed as the social counterpart to the physical dimension of place attachment.

Scale items

• I can't imagine living without the people that come to this place.
• I feel better if am not away from the people in this place for long periods of time.
• If the people in this place were permanently gone from my life, I'd be upset.
• Never being able to interact with the people here would be distressing to me.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Originally validated in a restaurant context using a community sample (n = 907) but item wording is adaptable to other retail and non-retail settings where meaningful social relationships form among people who frequent the place. Designed and validated as the companion to the Place Attachment - Physical Scale (ID 637); the two scales together capture the full place attachment construct as a dual-component construct. Attenuated reliability = .98. AVE = .92, indicating strong convergent validity. Items use a 7-point Likert format.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Brocato, E.D., Baker, J., & Voorhees, C.M. (2015). Creating consumer attachment to retail service firms through sense of place. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(2), 200-220.

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