Relationships Between Identity, Well-Being, and Willingness to Sacrifice in Personal and Collective Favorite Places: The Mediating Role of Well-Being

Abstract

In line with research indicating positive associations between well-being and personal and collective people-place bonding, and that collectivistic compared to individualistic commitment may have stronger associations with pro-environmental behavior, we investigated relationships between identity, well-being, and willingness to sacrifice (type of pro-environmental behavior) in personal and collective favorite places. A total of 884 respondents, living in three Swedish municipalities, participated in this study. In line with the hypotheses, we showed congruent positive relationships between place-related:(1) personal identity and personal well-being; (2) collective identity and collective wellbeing, (3) collective identity and collective willingness to sacrifice; and (4) an incongruent positive association between collective identity and personal willingness to sacrifice. Additionally, a significant role of well-being in mediating the identity → willingness to sacrifice relationship was reported, suggesting that our willingness to pay higher taxes and prices and to accept cuts in standard of living in order to protect our personal and collective favorite places might be accounted for partly by how we feel visiting these places.

Exploring Links between Polychronicity and Job Performance from the Person–Environment Fit Perspective—The Mediating Role of Well-Being

“…In organizational behavior research, well-being was proposed to discuss employees' opinions about and attitudes toward work. Well-being referred to an individual engaging in, being satisfying with, and enjoying the work [8,23]. Obrenovic et al [24] considered that well-being presented sustainability, proactivity, and strong motivation to work.…”

Countryside within the City: A Motivating Vision behind Civic Green Area Stewardship in Warsaw, Poland

“…Our results also indicate that communities had strong bonds internally and with places and thought of places as if they were "their own". Elements related to the sense of place literature were articulated among our key informants, particularly place attachment [8,10,16,67], as they were active in maintaining places that provided a shared identity for their community. The aspect of restoring places can often be seen in the civic ecology literature [5]; for example, in a study of oyster gardeners in New York [68], the authors found that sense of place was a motivating factor, together with meanings and memories.…”

“…Such a societal shift has been highlighted as a deep leverage point for sustainability transformations [3], as it could enhance the already globally occurring ubiquitous urban environmental protection activities, such as gardening, tree planting, the maintenance of parks, local food production and ecological conservation/restoration and even the creation of entirely new urban ecosystems [4][5][6]. The literature in psychology and sociology suggests that such pro-environmental behavior in turn could shape inner motivations for broad-based environmental action, such as fostering a stronger connection to nature and enhanced levels of place-based well-being [7][8][9][10]. The massive scale and pace of global urbanization may lead to an alienation process in which a significant proportion of the future human population will find itself separated from sensory interaction with natural environments, which may lead to a broad-based social-ecological amnesia [11][12][13][14].…”

“…A stewardship initiative is here defined as a group of people engaged in protection, restoration or creation of a green area; e.g., a community garden or a park. Urban gardens are examples of stewardship arenas where people can re-connect with nature, attach to place and build social cohesion [10,[20][21][22][23]. Such stewardship arenas also promote democratic values through cooperation and debate, which are much needed in the contemporary world [24].…”

“…Recent studies on urban food gardening initiatives in the Global North are indicating a plethora of coexisting motivations for such engagement, including access to superior or rare qualities of crops for consumption, supplementary incomes, health benefits, education and knowledge transmission, reducing environmental footprints, empowerment and strengthening community ties, and upkeep of cultural ecosystem services [5,35,36]. Additionally, negative life experiences may act as motivating factors; for instance, related to the loss or degradation of places seen as valuable [10,37]. In the following section, we present the study site and method, which is followed by a section in which we present our results based on qualitative analysis.…”