A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Adults' Formation of Sense of Community through Environmental Autobiography

In contemporary Korean society, urban community environment is often associated with high-density and high-rise residences that make people's relationships superficial, instrumental and impersonal. Furthermore, urban community consistently interplays with neighboring residents and childhood emotional experience are influential on their unconscious images and attitude about their current neighborhood environment, while affecting the environmental attitude and the formation of community sense. Previous research found evidences that increased level of community sense is fostering more feeling of living in so-called "real neighborhood environment." This study aimed to cross-culturally examine what the respondents' emotional perception and their attitude were about the community environment in their childhood through environmental autobiography method and to examine the effects of the results on adults' formation of sense of community for their current community environment. Extensive literature review explored a few important theoretical framework which are closely related to sense of community (SOC) as a result of emotional experience: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, shared emotional connection and community satisfaction. Chi-square and GLM analysis revealed that there were no demographic, and socio-economic differences between two groups of Korean and US residents. Correlation analysis indicated that childhood emotional experience of Koreans and US citizens was statistically significant on sense of community for their current living community. Multi-regression analysis also found that the degree of influence were the main predictors for building strong sense of current community throughout a cross-cultural group. Furthermore, the relationship between various emotional experience of each factor in previous and current community environment were statistically significantly related. It is concluded that as the positive childhood experience of influence in their past community was going up, the level of sense of community for their current community was strengthened across their cross-cultural background.