The Perception of Environmental Quality

Since the beginning of the environmental movement, an emphasis has been placed on the perception of a new entity: environmental quality. Prior to this movement, perception and perceptual studies focused on elements general to all environments, such as depth, color, texture, mobility, and other universal features. The new emphasis seeks to focus on specific aspects of the environment that are related to man’s welfare. If these specific aspects are rated high, we say the environmental quality is, therefore, high; if rated low, then the environmental quality is low. Unfortunately there is far from unanimous agreement on whether many specific aspects of the environment are related to man’s welfare and even some conceptual confusion as to how it is related. Nevertheless, the task is to penetrate these confusions and ambiguities and to determine if perceptions of environmental quality can be measured effectively enough to be of use in policy matters concerning environmental quality.