Evaluating Historical Districts: Exploring the Use of Photographs and Slide Experiments

Abstract

This study explores approaches and methods to investigate visitors' evaluation of historical districts. Personal interviews with use of repertory grid analysis and laddering analysis and slide experiments with photographs were conducted with a sample of students to reveal relationships between various evaluative components. The results of the two sets of methods are examined in a comparative manner to obtain abundant insights into evaluations of historical districts and the efficacy of these methods. The results provide insights into issues raised by past studies. Particularly, they shed light on the complex nature of visitors' evaluation of historical districts, as represented by the mixed effects of the presence of other people, commercialization, and modernity. Personal interviews and slide experiments are found to be mutually complementary in that, while the former illuminate the complex relationships between components of subjects' evaluations, the latter depict these relationships in a more holistic and simple form by uncovering the commonality between the elicited components. The findings of the slide experiments also suggest room for further attempts to elicit evaluative components. Further studies of this kind with different groups of subjects and in different field settings would provide further insights into this complex area.

The Effects of Westerners’ Presence on Japanese Evaluations of a Historic District: The Case of Takayama City

“…They concluded that the presence of other people discourages visitors' unique experiences and sense of the famous, touristic, and novel atmospheres. Naoi, Airey, and Iijima (2009) found results similar to Naoi et al (2007) using slide experiments. Aikoh et al (2002) investigated the effects of the number of people in photographs of a nature tourist attraction and found that the number of people in the photographs positively related to perceptions of crowding.…”

“…Photographs have been found to depict environments more accurately than written descriptions (Brown, Richards, Daniel, & King, 1989;Munson, 1993). Slide experiments have been used in previous studies of evaluations of tourist attractions (MacKay & Fesenmaier, 1997, 2000, historic districts as tourist attractions (Naoi & Iijima, 2004;Naoi et al, 2009), and tourist sites (Miyaji, Nishina, Tanaka, & Yoshihara, 2011).…”

“…Although Miyaji et al (2011) had 116 subjects, MacKay and Fesenmaier had 65 subjects (1997) and 10 subjects (2000), and Naoi and Iijima (2004) and Naoi et al (2009) each had 51 subjects. In all of the above studies, university students were employed.…”

“…These pairs of words were adopted from the results of previous studies (Aikoh et al, 2002;Naoi et al, 2009;Naoi & Iijima, 2004). The word pairs used in the study are listed in Table 1.…”

“…The subjects were required to rate each photograph after it had disappeared from the screen. Naoi and Iijima (2004) and Naoi et al (2009) had used 26 7-point scales for their 26 photographs and 30 5-point scales for their 30 photographs, and they presented each photograph for 20 seconds. Twenty seconds per photograph was considered an appropriate length of time considering the number of questions.…”