Environment And Behavior Studies

This eleventh volume in the series departs from the pattern of earlier volumes. Some of those volumes addressed research, design, and policy topics in terms of environmental settings, for example, homes, communities, neighborhoods, and public places. Others focused on environmental users, for example, chil dren and the elderly. The present volume examines the field of environment and behavior studies itself in the form of intellectual histories of some of its most productive and still visible senior participants. In so doing we hope to provide readers with a grand sweep of the field-its research and design content, methodology, institutions, and past and future trajectories-through the experiences and intellectual histories of its participants. Why intellectual histories? Several factors led to the decision to launch this project. For one, 1989 was an anniversary and commemorative year for the Environmental Design Research Association, perhaps the major and most long-standing interdisciplinary organization of environment and behavior re searchers and practitioners. Established in 1969, this organization has been the vehicle for generations of researchers and practitioners from many disciplines to come together annually to exchange ideas, present papers, and develop professional and personal relationships. It held its first and twentieth meetings in North Carolina, with the twentieth conference substantially devoted to dis cussions of the past, present, and future of the field-a taking stock, so to speak. Thus it seemed appropriate to launch a volume on intellectual histories at this significant juncture in the life of the field.

Describes thirteen cases in which architects, city planners and designers used psychological theory and research to make their work more responsive to the needs of people.

This comprehensive, introductory text presents a unified view of human environment problems. Unlike most texts in the field that treat environmental psychology as a branch of psychology only, Environment and Behavior covers the topic from a cross-disciplinary nature. The book is more inclusive of all aspects of environmental studies and emphasizes the innovative thinking required to deal with environmental problems. The breadth of coverage offered by Environment and Behavior will enable the instructor to choose the focus for each particular course because it contains chapters on a variety of subject areas, including environmental engineering, biology, geography, architecture, evolutionary biology, sociology, clinical psychology, and gerontology. Environment and Behavior is a one-of-a-kind text with a unique style that will make it a must for all courses related to the environment, including urban studies and psychology.

The inception of this volume can be traced to a series of Environmental Psychology Colloquia presented at the University of California, Irvine, dur ing the spring of 1974. These colloquia were held in conjunction with Social Ecology 252, a graduate seminar on Man and the Environment. Although the eight colloquia covered a wide range of topics and exemplified a diversity of research techniques, they seemed to converge on some common theoretical and methodological assumptions about the na ture of environment-behavioral research. The apparent continuities among these colloquia suggested the utility of developing a manuscript that would provide a historical overview of research on environment and be havior, a representation of its major concerns, and an analysis of its concep tual and empirical trends. Thus, expanded versions of the initial presen tations were integrated with a supplemental set of invited manuscripts to yield the present volume of original contributions by leading researchers in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology.

Following upon the Handbook of Japan-United States Environment-Behavior Research, published by Plenum in 1997, leading experts review the interrelationships among theory, problem, and method in environment-behavior research. The chapters focus on the philosophical and theoretical assumptions underlying current research and practice in the area and link those assumptions to specific substantive questions and methodologies

Research into spatial influences on people's everyday activities and experiences presents many conceptual and methodological complexities. Written by leading authorities, this book provides a comprehensive framework for collecting and analyzing reliable person?environment?behavior data in real-world settings that rarely resemble the controlled conditions described in typical texts. An array of research designs are illustrated in chapter-length examples addressing such compelling issues as spatial patterns of voting behavior, ways in which disabilities affect people's travel and wayfinding, how natural and built environments evoke emotional responses, spatial factors in elementary teaching and learning, and more. A special chapter guides the student or beginning researcher to craft a successful research proposal.

Illustrating his points with many references to actual projects, John Zeisel explains, in non-technical language, the integration of social science research and design. The book provides a provocative text for students in all the fields related to environm

This is the first in a series of volumes concerned with research encompassed by the rather broad term "environment and behavior. " The goal of the series is to begin the process of integration of knowledge on environmental and behavioral topics so that researchers and professionals can have material from diverse sources accessible in a single publication. The field of environment and behavior is broad and interdiscipli nary, with researchers drawn from a variety of traditional disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, and other social and behavioral sciences, and from the biological and life sciences of medicine, psychiatry, biology, and ethology. The interdis ciplinary quality of the field is also reflected in the extensive involve ment of environmental professionals from architecture, urban plan ning, landscape architecture, interior design, and other fields such as recreation and natural resources, to name just a few. At present, the field has a somewhat chaotic flavor, with research being carried out by a variety of scholars who publish in a multitude of outlets. Many researchers and practitioners are unaware of the state of knowledge regarding a specific topic because of the unavailability of integrated reference materials. There are only a handful of books dealing with environment and behavior, most of them unintegrated collections of readings, with only an occasional systematic analysis of some facet of the field.