A Study of the Relationships Among Residents’ Nature Connection, Sense of Community and Community Participation：The Case of Yunlin Country

• Main Authors: Guang-You Yu, 余光祐
• Other Authors: Chih-Cheng Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/564ksj

碩士 === 國立虎尾科技大學 === 休閒遊憩系碩士班 === 104 === In recent years, Taiwan has be promoting community development to improve the difficulties encountered in rural communities. Although the government has subsidized rural communities to promote community development, however, the most essential factor is to arouse local residents’ community consciousness to promote community participation by the bottom-up approach.Nature connection is defined as the level that we close to the natural environment, which is used to predict happiness and the environmental behavior. Besides, nature connection can also understand our affections on the natural environment, which needs long time to cultivate by contacting the natural environment; then, it can have an individual to generate nature connection. Thus, residents in the rural communities with abundant natural resources have an advantage to generate nature connection. However, current community development mainly focuses on emphasizing to live in harmony with the nature, and encourages residents to become nature protectors. Thus, in the study, we tried to explore if those people who have higher nature connection will have higher community participation since participating in community work and activities becomes an action to protect the environment. A survey was conducted, and the participants were residents in rural communities in Yunlin County. 401 copies of questionnaires were sent out. We used SEM, an Independent T-Test, and the one-way ANOVA to analyze the collected data. The results of the study show that the residents from the community which mainly develops the ecological environment have higher nature connection, community awareness, and community participation than those from the community which does not focus on developing the ecological environment. Residents’ characteristics have significant differences on nature connection, community awareness, and community participation. Nature connection has a significant influence on community awareness (t=7.338，p<.05). Nature connection has a significant influence on community participation (t=7.403，p<.05).