Research on the Measurement, Evaluation and Compensation of Traditional Village Residents’ Emotional Perception: A Case of 14 Traditional Villages in Guanzhong Region

Since the start of the 21st century, geography has gradually emphasized the influence of emotions on space and society. Anderson and Smith formally proposed the concept of Emotional Geographies and advocated the research of the influence of emotions on spatial and man–land relations in 2001 [7]. The key role of emotions in man–land relations is generally recognized, and scholars have conducted extensive research into them. The research of the traditional village residents’ emotional perception centers on the emotional relationship between people and places. Place attachment, which is an important geographic concept in the study of human–land emotions, is the theoretical background for the in-depth exploration needed for this paper [8]. In 1974, Tuan observed and proposed topophilia firstly, and he suggested that places give people a sense of identity and security while providing them with life’s necessities [9]. After that, words such as place attachment, sense of place and other expressions of human–land relations continued to emerge [10]. In 1982, Shumaker clarified the definition of place attachment as a positive emotional connection [11]. Williams and Roggenbuck conducted systematic analysis of place attachment firstly, and constructed a two-dimensional scale of place attachment [12,13]. Jorgensen and Stedman considered place attachment as a three-dimensional framework consisting of place dependence, emotional attachment and place identity [14,15]. Hammitt proposed place familiarity, sense of belonging, place rootedness and other factors affecting place attachment [16,17,18]. Raymond constructed a model containing five dimensions of place identity, place dependence, nature ties, family ties and friend ties to measure the degree of rural landowners’ attachment to place [19]. Based on theoretical studies and measurement scale studies of place attachment, scholars have begun to research the different groups’ level of place attachment and the influencing factors. Traditional village is the special community [20]. According to Deng Sui, community emotion refers to positive emotions that are conducive to harmonious relationships among community members, such as sense of belonging, sense of identity, sense of intimacy and sense of attachment, among which the sense of belonging is the core of the individual’s emotion towards the community [21]. Wu Rong measures the man–land emotions of residents through four dimensions: community trust, community satisfaction, community attachment and urban attachment, and utilizes the independent samples t-test method and structural equation modeling to explore the mechanism of the role between the dimensions [22]. Chen Chirui proposes to study the emotions of impoverished farmers through the five dimensions of sense of belonging, sense of happiness, risk aversion and relative deprivation and sense of loss, and constructed a mechanism of emotional reconstruction by using the in-depth interview method and the participatory observation method [5]. Lin Yuancheng measures the emotional connection of rural residents to their place based on the dimensions of place attachment and place identity, and explored the significance of cultural space on the shaping of sense of place [23]. Xing Tenghui explores the influence and constructive role of landscape on the emotions of urban residents [24]. Zou Xueping conducts an empirical study on the emotions of the migrant population and the individual’s perceptions of life in the community by using the questionnaire survey method [25]. Lv Long finds that the place attachment of the residents had a significant positive impact on their tendency of inherited behaviors [26]. Finally, Ramkissoon finds that the stronger the residents’ place attachment is, the more they will do behaviors that benefits the environment [27]. Conversely, with the booming development of rural tourism and its economic utility, the “human” perception effect has become a new perspective in the research of the development momentum of traditional villages [28]. Scholars have started to focus on the relationship between sense of place and tourism residents [29]. Kim firstly establishes an evaluation model to quantify the perception of tourism destination residents from the positive and negative aspects of tourism impact [30]; Lankford and Howard constructs a tourism impact attitude scale containing two major factor layers and 27 variable index layers, and applied multiple regression analysis to test the effect of variable indicator strata on residents’ attitudes [31]; Yoon and Gursoy constructs a scale with four perceptual dimensions of economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts to measure tourism perceptions of residents in tourist destinations, and applied structural equation modeling to analyze the path of influence between the structures [32]. The subsequent studies on the evaluation of the perceptions of residents in tourist destinations are mostly based on the above scale [33], optimize and adjust according to the characteristics of the research object itself.

Previous studies have focused on emotional governance [21,22,24], emotional perception of special groups [25], the mechanism of the interplay between behaviors and emotional perception of rural residents [5,23,26] and tourism impact perceptions [30,31,32]. These studies lay the foundation for the later studies and constitute a preliminary exploration in terms of human–land emotion research methodology. Traditional village residents are the basic social units in the village integrating production, consumption and bloodline, and their behavioral logic is not only economically rational, but also socially rational [5]. According to the theory of social psychology [3], the degree of satisfaction of residents’ emotional needs governs their behavioral choices, so the emotional perception of residents is a field of concern in the study of human–land relations in traditional villages. Paying attention to the discussion of residents’ emotional factors and improving the level of TVREP which aims to prompt residents to make positive behaviors is of great practical significance to ensure that traditional villages achieve healthy and sustainable development.