Abstract: Studying how residents perceive the residential environment and live their lives by compromise with residence leads to understand their recognition and coping with the world itself. The present study adopted qualitative method to reconsider such a wide, complex, and multi-layered phenomenon of the residential environment recognition. In-depth interviews were held with 16 Japanese participants. The subjects were mainly asked about impressions and evaluations of their present residential environments, centering on his/her house. The Modified Grounded Theory Approach (M-GTA) was utilized for analyzing data because it enables researcher to reveal clearly the common structures among cases. Through the analysis with M-GTA, 23 concepts were extracted, and from these concepts a common structure was identified as: one core category “Recognition and Evaluation of Residential Environment” fulfills a problem discovery function, and one category “Coping with Environment” plays a problem solving role, and another core category “View of Residential Life” leads to comprehensive grasp of circumstances and adjusts other two categories to function effectively. Furthermore, the significance and the limitation of this research were also discussed.

This study conducted a questionnaire survey to examine whether residents of Makomanai district, Sapporo city intended to use the pro-environmental transportations, which local NPOs and citizen groups consider to install in the area. The results revealed that a) awareness of the consequences of environmental problems had a positive effect on ascribed responsibility, and ascribed responsibility had a positive effect on moral obligation, b) moral obligation, perceived social norms and public benefit evaluation had positive direct effects on the intention to use the pro-environmental transportations, whereas the effects of cost evaluation and perceived behavioral control were not significant, and c) although community attachment correlated with the intention, it had a negative direct effect. The present study implies that it would be effective to emphasize social norms and public benefits of the pro-environmental transportations in order to nudge residents to use them.