抄録
For preservation of living environment, it has become growingly important that inhabitants themselves should more positively and subjectively take part in environmental preservation activities in the community. They are also expected to have an improved understanding and awareness about their living environment.
The level of participation in the activities of an individual is affected by several factors. A function which can express the level of the participation of an individual, developed newly here, is a product of subfunctions of these factors such as his availability of time, health conditions, economic affluence, the number of opportunity to participate, and strength of the incentives encouraging the participation. The incentives are composed of active, passive, anti-active, anti-passive, and habitual ones. These variables depend on the individual attributes, social systems, as well as regional characteristics. In order to study these variables, a questionaire survey was made, as a case study, on the inhabitants' participation in the environmental cleaning activities of the creeks in Yanagawa. As a result, the availability of time was found to be a major factor which is determinative on the participation level and with regard to the incentive, an socially established custom, that is, common space is to be kept clean by the inhabitants, was a major one. The results in Yanagawa seem to be applicable to inhabitants in areas where have not been urbanized completely in Japan.
