The Effect of Healing Perception on the Visitors’ Place Attachment and Their Loyalty toward a Metropolitan Park—Under the Aspect of Environmental Design

Heng Zhang, Nam Nguyen-Dinh, Hazreena Hussein and Hong-Wei Ho
Additional contact information
Heng Zhang: Department of Architecture, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City 70101, Taiwan
Nam Nguyen-Dinh: Department of Architecture, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City 70101, Taiwan
Hazreena Hussein: Centre of Sustainable Planning & Real Estate, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603, Malaysia
Hong-Wei Ho: Department of Architecture, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City 70101, Taiwan

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 12, 1-18

Abstract: Healing perception is considered to increase visitors’ place attachment and loyalty. This research employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the structural relationship between healing perception, place attachment, environmental design, and visitors’ loyalty to a place. The study investigated a metropolitan park in Gaoxiong, Taiwan, and collected 431 valid questionnaires on the site. The results showed that the environmental design affected the human perception of healing and place attachment, which substantially affected the visitors’ loyalty toward the place. The healing perception powerfully impacted loyalty (0.76), which contained an indirect effect through place attachment and enhanced the direct impact of healing perception. Moreover, the environmental design had a capable direct effect (0.62) on visitors’ loyalty through two full mediation paths: healing perception and place attachment. The study sheds light on designing a healing park that could enhance visitors’ place attachment and strongly affect their loyalty to the park.

Keywords: environmental design; place attachment; healing perception; place loyalty; structural equation modeling (SEM); full mediation effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/12/7060/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/12/7060/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:12:p:7060-:d:834726

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().