The relationship between place satisfaction and level of sense of place : a case study of the private shopping centres in Hong Kong

Abstract

In recent years, there is a declining trend of visitors due to the shifts towards online shopping and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. To address this issue, it is suggested that a better shopping experience is provided, and visitors’ emotion and their sense of place are examined to formulate a suitable strategy to sustain the mall. This study investigates the role of place satisfaction in visitors’ sense of place toward the private shopping centre. By using a quantitative approach, this study seek to investigate the relationship between place satisfaction, other visitation characteristics such as length of residence, visitation frequency and visiting group and sense of place in private shopping centres context located in Hong Kong. The study utilizes a survey questionaries to collect data from visitors of private shopping centre in Hong Kong. A total of 200 questionaries was collected for the study. The questionaries include measure of place satisfaction, sense of place by asking the respondents to rate the statement, as well as demographic information. The data is analyzed by using non-parametric test, which allows for testing the hypotheses method between the ordinal variables. The result of the finding suggest that place satisfaction is positively corelated with sense of place. In addition, the study findings also suggested that visitors’ sense of place towards private shopping centre is influenced by both place satisfaction and other visitation characteristics, such as length of residence and visiting group. In particular, visitors who have longer length of residence and those who visit with groups are more likely to have a stronger sense of place towards the private shopping centres. However, contrary to the hypotheses, the study revealed that both frequent and non-frequent visitors could experience high level of sense of place. Based on the findings, this research suggested that building managers should consider sense of place as an indicator when allocating budget and resource to manage the private shopping centre. Overall, this research provides novel insights into understanding the sense of place and provides some managerial implications for the building manager.