The main concern of this project was urban quality of life. Components analyzed were walkability, place attachment, perceived neighborhood disorder and collective action tendency. This project was granted to Michał Jaśkiewicz by SONATA 8 scheme by the National Science Centre in Poland.
One of the outcomes of the research was the adaptation of a Polish version of the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS-Poland). The study systematically adapted the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) for Poland and evaluated the construct validity of the adapted version among Polish adults. Participants from the Tri-City (Trójmiasto) agglomeration completed the adapted version of the NEWS. Smaller extracted samples of participants also completed scales related to well-being, including measures of self-efficacy, local identity, and distance to the city center. It was hypothesized that various districts of Gdańsk would differ in terms of walkability. The confirmatory factor analysis showed satisfactory goodness-of-fit statistics and factor loadings corresponding to the proposed original factor structure. As expected, the NEWS subscales correlated with measures of self-efficacy, local identity, and well-being. Furthermore, comparisons between the neighborhoods of Gdańsk revealed a predictable pattern of results. Overall, the NEWS demonstrated satisfactory measurement properties and may be useful in evaluating the built environment in Poland.
Another goal of the project was to examine the relationship between place attachment and the tendency toward collective action, and to explore the roles of self-expansion and social interactions in this relationship. In the first study, we found that a more active form of attachment—referred to as ‘place discovered’—significantly predicted the tendency to engage in collective action in support of one’s neighborhood. The second study focused on the frequency of social interactions within one’s neighborhood as an antecedent of place attachment and collective action tendencies. We found that residents who reported more frequent social interactions in their neighborhood also expressed stronger ‘place discovered,’ and this form of attachment was related to a greater tendency toward collective action. In the third study, we tested whether self-expansion mediated this relationship. The results indicated that stronger ‘place discovered’ was associated with feelings of self-expansion stemming from interactions with neighbors. Additionally, self-expansion was linked to a higher tendency to engage in collective action
You can check the outputs of the project here on the National Science Centre website.