Date Available

12-18-2013

Year of Publication

2013

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Document Type

Master's Thesis

College

Agriculture, Food and Environment

Department/School/Program

Community and Leadership Development

First Advisor

Dr. Gary Hansen

Abstract

A wide range of research fields have studied how emotions and behavior are affected by the physical environment. This gestalt theorist approach of experimental research as well seeks to measure emotion (using the valence-arousal scale) and micro-scale community development interactions when weighted physical environment factors are adjusted. Community development (CD) interactions at the micro-scale have received but slight attention from scholars in the CD research field and this study aims partially to investigate developing objective measures from social observations. CD interactions from recordings along with self-reported emotion through surveys in four quasi-experimental groups (where the environments were constructed based on peer-reviewed literature to cause emotional reactions) and one control group made up the data collected for this experiment. While the results of this experiment displayed apparent convincing quantitative differences in both CD interactions and emotion when the physical environment was manipulated, the results of a one-way ANOVA indicated no statistical significance to either dependent variable. The conclusions suggest limiting the physical factors of the environment to produce more precise changes as a result of the manipulated quasi environments.

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