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The impact of residential environment reputation on residential environment choices

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Abstract

Using a Danish household survey data from 2011, this paper investigates whether the choice of living in rural or urban residential environments is linked to the perceived reputation of such environments. Results from multiple ordered logit regressions show that the perceived status attached to living in different residential environments is strongly associated with current residential environment. For example, the probability of living in a large city was found to increase by 0.7 % along a 19-scale variable measuring the perceived degree of status attached to living in urban versus rural residential areas. Among other findings, the results suggest that causality mostly flows from status perceptions to residential environment choices.

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Notes

  1. Negative terminology included the four terms ‘the rotten banana’, ‘outskirt Denmark’, ‘the outskirt areas’ and ‘the peripheral areas’, whereas neutral terminology included the three terms ‘the rural areas’, ‘the rural districts’ and ‘in the countryside’. The rate of occurrence of each term was found through a electronic media data bank search, whereby including the total production of Danish national newspapers, regional newspapers, professional journals and magazines, news agencies, internet sources and other sources from 1 January 2006 to 31 December 2011 (Winther and Svendsen 2012).

  2. The professional institute acquired representative extracts from Statistics Denmark in September 2011, covering each of the four stratas separately. The entire sample is thus not representative of the entire country, but representative within stratas. Compared to the entire country, respondents from peripheral municipalities are overrepresented, and respondents from urban municipalities are underrepresented. By comparing the number of respondents in each municipality group with the total population numbers (people aged 18 and above) in the four municipality groups at the time of data extraction, the institute calculated the following weights (weights shown in brackets): peripheral municipalities (0.36), rural municipalities (1.06), intermediate municipalities (0.63) and urban municipalities (1.95).

  3. In the weighted sample, 44 % of the respondents think that more status is attached to living in urban residential environments, 40 % think that an equal level of status is attached to living in urban and rural residential environments, and finally, 16 % think that more status is attached to living in rural residential environments.

  4. There is undoubtedly some degree of correlation among independent variables. This could have led to multicollinearity. To check whether multicollinearity constitutes a problem, a variance inflation factor (VIF) multicollinearity test was performed using linear regression (based on the two regressions in Table 5). The VIFs for individual independent variables were found to range from 1.04 to 6.49. The common rule of thumb is that multicollinearity is present if the VIF of a single variable exceeds 10 (Gujarati, 2003, p. 362). Thus, the regression analyses do not seem to suffer from problems of multicollinearity.

  5. In 2011, self-employed people occupied in the fields of ‘agriculture and horticulture’ made up 15.3 % of all self-employed people in Denmark, according to own calculations based on publicly available, online data delivered by Statistics Denmark (www.statistikbanken.dk).

  6. The results also stem from the mere categorisation of the income variable. Collapsing the first two income categories, for example, changes the results considerably. Thus, using this 3-scale income variable, the middle and the upper income category get statistically insignificant coefficients when regressed on current residential environment. And when regressed on preferred residential environment, the middle category gets a statistically insignificant coefficient (coefficient = 0.154, z-value = 1.14; two-tailed p value = 0.25), and the upper income category gets a statistically significant coefficient with a positive sign (coefficient = 0.522, z-value = 3.52; two-tailed p value < 0.001). When income is entered in the regressions as a continuous variable, its coefficients are statistically insignificant in both regressions (both have two-tailed p values = 0.37). When linear and quadratic terms for income are introduced in the regressions, only one of the four coefficients is statistically significant (a negative coefficient for the linear term in the current residential environment regression, only significant at the 10 % level).

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  1. Danish Centre for Rural Research, University of Southern Denmark, Niels Bohrs Vej 9, 6700, Esbjerg, Denmark

    Jens F. L. Sørensen

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Sørensen, J.F.L. The impact of residential environment reputation on residential environment choices. J Hous and the Built Environ 30, 403–425 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-014-9419-0

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