Children, Youth and Environments.
Vol 14, No.1 (2004)
Perceived Restorative Components: A Scale for Children
Kathleen L. Bagot
Citation: Bagot, Kathleen L. (2004). "Perceived Restorative Components; A Scale for Children." Children, Youth and Environments 14(1): 120-140.
This study reports on the development and psychometric validation of a perceived restorative components scale for children (PRCS-C). Children (n=112 boys, n=113 girls) aged 8 to 11 years completed an initial pool of 23 items addressing the components of a restorative environment to assess two familiar, everyday environments- their school playground and their school library. Factor analysis indicated a five-factor model (Being Away– Physical, Being Away- Psychological, Fascination, Compatibility and Extent) of 15 items best fit the data, consistent with prior adult restorativeness measure research and fitting within Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory. Satisfactory internal consistency was found for four of the five factors, with a two-item construct of Extent being lowest. School playgrounds had significantly higher restoration potential than school libraries, when compared with school classrooms, indicating divergent validity of the measure. Results were examined by sex and age and differences reported as a broad indicator of the measure’s ability to differentiate between groups of people’s reports of perceived restorativeness and possible developmental differences.
Research into environments that are restorative to children’s attention has been hindered by the absence of a measure children can complete to report the perceived restoration potential of their environments. Such a measure would provide researchers with a tool that would improve understanding of restorative components and environments in children’s lives and allow the evaluation and comparison of environments frequented by children from their perspective. In turn, children’s environments could be enhanced or indeed designed to include elements that support and facilitate the restoration of their attention, providing a “user-friendly,” effective, yet economical resource to support children’s development and overall life effectiveness.
Two of the key journals for person-environment researchers have dedicated special issues to environments that facilitate the restoration of attentional capacity (Journal of Environmental Psychology 23(2), 2003 and Environment and Behavior 33(4), 2001). Noticeably absent from both issues, however, was work involving children. Although an argument exists for initially establishing outcomes with one sample only (i.e., adults), this approach results in research with children being delayed, or even disregarded. The aim of this paper is to make a step towards addressing such a delay.
Although research with adults and restorative environments has been dominant (e.g., Hartig, Mang, and Evans 1991; Herzog and Gale 1996; Kaplan 2001a; Korpela, Hartig, Kaiser, and Fuhrer 2001; Kuo and Sullivan 2001), a number of studies have examined the relationship between different types of environments, typically varying in levels of natural elements (e.g., trees and grassy spaces), and children’s attentional capacity (Faber Taylor, Kuo, and Sullivan 2001; Grahn, Martensson, Lindblad, Nilsson, and Elkman 1997; Wells 2000). Some of these studies have drawn on Attention Restoration Theory (ART) (Kaplan 1995; Kaplan and Kaplan 1989) to explain their findings. They reported restoration of attention; however, they did not include an assessment of the level of restorative components within the environments.
Establishing the relationships between the perceived restorative potential in environments, the experience of attention restoration and environmental elements including levels of nature, requires a valid measure of the restorative components for children. To date, this has not been considered in the literature and is the goal of this study. This paper outlines ART, reviews each of the proposed components of restorative environments, touches on measures developed for adults and then repo