Despite place attachment's prominence within the environmental psychology literature, the scales and items used to measure place attachment vary significantly, hindering the ability of researchers to rally behind a standard measure. These types of discrepancies hamper the ability of researchers to directly compare findings across communities and conduct metanalyses on the antecedents and outcomes of place attachment. Furthermore, scales consisting of more than three items may unnecessarily burden respondents, thus impeding opportunities to add new constructs to surveys so that the precursors and outcomes of place attachment can be better understood. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to present and test the cross-cultural reliability and validity of an Abbreviated Place Attachment Scale (APAS) (i.e., three items for place identity and three items for place dependence) across seven samples spanning five data collections and four countries (United States, Cape Verde, Nigeria and Poland) involving residents and visitors. Confirmatory factor analysis reveals that the abbreviated scales perform just as well as their extended parents, and the multi-group confirmatory factor analysis reveals full measurement invariance demonstrating that the APAS is equivalent across cultures. Based on these results, the APAS should be given full attention by place attachment researchers seeking to expand the literature on the understanding of how people connect to places and the implications that these connections have on other important constructs such as quality of life, support for tourism, and place-based conservation efforts or individual environmental behaviors.

Increasing demand for water-based recreation comes with the need for recreation site managers to consider how to best satisfy different stakeholder groups. However, much of the previous water-based recreation literature has treated resident users and tourist users as one homogeneous group despite differences in frequency of use, proximity to site, and economic importance of visitation to the local economy. Hence, this study segmented residents from tourists and conducted separate importance performance analyses (IPA) to see if these two distinct groups have different preferences for and perceptions of stream-access sites in southeast Appalachia. Data were collected using an intercept survey method across ten different Tennessee Valley Authority stream-access sites in north Georgia and western North Carolina. Independent samples t-tests reveal significant differences between residents and tourists on 10 of the 23 importance attributes and performance attributes. The IPAs reveal different quadrant placements for 9 of the 23 attributes. Specifically, tourists expressed greater dissatisfaction with information accessibility such as online information and river maps, and residents tended to place higher importance on the boating aspects of stream-access sites with higher levels of importance placed on attributes such as ramps, put in and take out sites, and room to maneuver trailers, illustrating the efficacy of segmenting residents and tourists within the context of IPA. Implications include management aims addressing both residents' and tourists' preferences for stream-access sites to simultaneously enhance regional tourism for its economic benefits while enriching the experiences of residents.