Perceived Quality of Urban Wetland Parks: A Second-Order Factor Structure Equation Modeling

Jiang Li,Qiao Pan,Shaobo Liu,Yicheng Yin,Tao Feng,You Peng,Chixing Zhong,Xiaoxi Cai,Wenbo Lai

doi:10.3390/su12177204

Abstract

Wetland in the urban or peri-urban areas has been recognized as an important component of urban ecosystems and provides ecological and environmental services. Wetland park emerged as a kind of restoration of natural wetlands in the context of increasing pressure on land and eco-environment caused by urban sprawl, which has played an essential role in providing recreational spaces/opportunities and improving social interactions. However, little research has been conducted on the theoretical formulation elaborating individuals’ perceived quality of wetland parks when people are engaging in activities therein. This study is an attempt to develop a method to measure the quality of wetland parks based on individuals’ various perceptions and attitudes. From the view of human-nature interaction, the perceived quality is hypothetically conceptualized as a composite of two dimensions, such as comfort perception and environmental satisfaction. A series of questionnaire-based surveys were conducted among respondents (N = 936) in Yanghu wetland park in Changsha, China. Based on the measured items from on-site surveys, second-order factor structural equation modeling is applied to estimate the hypothesis of a hierarchical structure for elaborating how the quality of wetland park is perceived by individual respondents. The results test the hypothesis that the quality of wetland park as a second-order theoretical construct can be conceptualized by two first-order theoretical constructs, individuals’ comfort (loading = 0.749), and environmental satisfaction (loading = 0.828). In addition, a significant influence of attitudes toward green space on the perceived quality of wetland park has been identified.

Highlights

Rapid urbanization is expected to emerge in developing countries in the several decades, reflected in the number of urban inhabitants exceeding 60% of the world’s population by the year 2030 [1]
Regarding monthly income denominated by Chinese Yuan (CNY), 52.8% of respondents earn less than 5000 CNY including over one-third of respondents with no independent income
This points out a very strong relationships between perceived quality of the wetland park and comfort and environmental satisfaction, which attests to the convergent validity of theoretical construct of quality of wetland parks meaningfully conceptualized through second-order modeling

Summary

Introduction

Rapid urbanization is expected to emerge in developing countries in the several decades, reflected in the number of urban inhabitants exceeding 60% of the world’s population by the year 2030 [1]. As increasing stress is placed upon urban nature and the ecosystem, the reduction of green covers and degradation of water bodies eventually will raise the heat island phenomenon and anthropogenic energy consumptions in urban areas [2,3]. The provision of a comfortable open space in urban environments has become a major challenge in people’s quality of life. Findings of empirical investigations have indicated that the presence of natural areas and green infrastructures in cities has the potential to fend off the adverse challenges on vulnerable urban environments and positively affects the life quality of inhabitants [6,7,8,9,10,11]. Investigations on people’s comfort perception related to urban nature and green infrastructure grows steadily [12,13,14,15]. It is well documented that exposure in green space is associated with numerous health benefits [16,17,18,19,20,21]

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Conclusion