The Traits of City Personality: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

City personality means a set of human characteristics associated with the city brand. Several studies haveadopted city personality measurement scale to assess their own country personality. In Thailand, there have been studieson the city brand based on quantitative methods, which are unable to identify some emerging personality traits. Inaddition, there seems to be no research using qualitative methods to study personality traits in the Thai context. Hence,this research is aimed at identifying city personality traits by interviews so as to specifically assess such traits in theThai city context. Purposive sampling with the students of Khon Kaen University was conducted as the students wereable to give detailed information and had relatively long time for interviews. Moreover, Khon Kaen is a city outstandingin both functionality and value, which enables those studying in this city to provide city personality traits categorizedinto different groups. In so doing, 31 students who were well-informed with this conceptual framework and willing toparticipate in this study were chosen. The interviews began with categorizing cities into three groups: functional,valuable,and functional and valuable cities so that the research participants could identify which city they know based on thesecategories. The researchers then put the cities nominated by the participants in order within each category by askingthem to choose two cities they thought would best represent each category. Through this process, the cities chosen totaledsix, which would answer the questions of city personality traits. Each participant must provide at least five words relatedto one city, which generated for at least 30 words from each participant. Results reveal that the top three functional citiesinclude Bangkok, Chon Buri, and Rayong. The top three valuable cities are Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, and Chiang Mai. Thebest functional and valuable cities contain Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen, and Nakhon Ratchasima. Meanwhile, 281 personalitytraits are found in the Thai city context. Among them, 61 are similar to those identified by previous research on othercities around the world while 220 are discovered in Thai cities only. These results are therefore useful for developing acity personality scale by drawing on the identified city personality traits. It is also interesting to note that both positiveand negative city personality traits emerging from this study have never appeared in the brand personality. This meansthat cities may have different personality traits from those of brands and thus it is necessary to develop a city personalityseparately from the brand personality scale. As for relevant tourism agencies, this information helps promote positivepersonality traits for countries and cities. At the same time, it tends to prevent and reduce negative city personalitytraits. Future studies may further assess these city personality traits by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses,thereby making it possible to develop a city personality scale for Thailand, which can position the right personality forThai cities.