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Methods. This presentation reports on a pilot study to determine if self-report response items could be developed that tap each of these dimensions. Literature in environmental psychology regarding place attachment (Proshansky et al., 1983) and leisure behavior regarding activity involvement (Wellman et al., 1982) were consulted to generate resource dependence and resource identity items. In addition, items were proposed, reviewed, and edited by three researchers (other than the authors) which resulted in 11 resource dependence and 16 resource identity items. These items were evaluated for construct validity and reliability by presenting the items in the form of a questionnaire to 129 students from four universities who completed the questionnaire as part of a class assignments. Subjects responded to items such as" This place means a lot to me'and'I wouldn't substitute any other area for doing the type of things I did here" on a five-point Likert scale (" strongly agree" to" strongly disagree'). Subjects were asked to respond with respect to a'wilderness, backcountry, roadless or natural area" they had visited recently. Because the primary interest for this study was the inter-item correlation structure, no attempt was made to distinguish types of resource attachment across settings.

Results. Factor, reliability and correlation analyses were conducted on the responses to the 27 items to verify the assumption of two attachment dimensions and are presented in Tables 1 and 2. A three-factor solution produced the most meaningful results based on an analysis of eigenvalues and factor structure matrices. Items were considered part of a factor if they loaded …