Perceived residential environment quality in middle- and low-extension Italian cities

This paper presents two updated instruments measuring the inhabitants’ perceived quality of their neighbourhood in urban places. This sphere is part of the environmental domain, which is considered one of the four components in individuals’ overall quality of life (WHO Group, 1998). The instruments consist of eleven scales measuring Perceived Residential Environment Quality (PREQ) indicators and one scale measuring Neighbourhood Attachment (NA). PREQ scales are included in the four generative criteria as follows: three scales deal with spatial aspects (i.e., architectural-planning space, organisation and accessibility of space, green areas); one scale concerns human aspects (i.e., people and social relations); four scales relate to functional aspects (i.e., welfare, recreational, commercial and transportation services); three scales deal with contextual aspects (i.e., pace of life, environmental health, upkeep). The objectives are: a) to generalize the structure and number of both the PREQ and NA indexes (previously verified on various residential areas of a large city like Rome; see Bonaiuto et al., 2003; Bonnes et al., 1997) on medium- and low-extension cities; b) to improve the psychometric qualities (i.e., internal consistency coefficients) of the scales; c) to verify the capacity of PREQ and NA indexes to discriminate between cities. The instruments consist of a self-report questionnaire, which was administered to 1,488 residents in different neighbourhoods of 11 Italian middle- and low-extension cities (from 50,000 to 400,000 inhabitants). Results confirm the factorial structure of the scales, which include nineteen PREQ indexes and one NA index. The scales show an increased level of reliability with respect to previous studies.