Social sci­en­tists have long con­sid­ered place attach­ment to be an impor­tant fac­tor in pro­mot­ing envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able behav­iours among indi­vid­u­als. Ray­mond and col­leagues have devel­oped a five-fac­tor place attach­ment mea­sure, com­pris­ing place depen­dence, nature depen­dence, place attach­ment, fam­i­ly bond­ing, and friend­ship bond­ing, that encom­pass­es most of the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tions made and that has been amply test­ed for valid­i­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty. How­ev­er, the bulk of these con­fir­ma­to­ry stud­ies have been con­duct­ed in West­ern soci­eties, neglect­ing peo­ple in the Glob­al South and par­tic­u­lar­ly peo­ple liv­ing in unsta­ble, envi­ron­men­tal­ly frag­ile regions such as slum areas.

This study aims to fill this omis­sion by test­ing the psy­cho­me­t­ric qual­i­ties of the five-fac­tor place attach­ment mea­sure in Indone­sian slums using a dataset col­lect­ed by the Resilient Indone­sian Slums Envi­sioned (RISE) project. The dataset con­sists of a ran­dom sam­ple of 700 respon­dents, liv­ing in slum areas of the cities of Bima, Man­a­do, and Pon­tianak.

We split the dataset into two and run fac­tor analy­ses in EFA and CFA (N = 375) modes. Most notably, our results sug­gest a four-fac­tor scale, in which place and nature depen­dences are merged into a sin­gle dimen­sion. This find­ing seems log­i­cal con­sid­er­ing that those liv­ing in urban slums are like­ly to have their nat­ur­al sur­round­ings, such as a riv­er and its banks, as part of their liv­ing space.

Over­all, our study extends the use of place attach­ment to dis­as­ter-prone slum con­texts that are often over­looked and, thus, sup­ports the line of research that pro­motes envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty among peo­ple espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to eco­log­i­cal changes.