Does University Campus Place Attachment Matter Among Transnational Students

Place attachment or ‘the emotional bond between person and place’ is essential in the process of assimilating transnational students into the new educational environment as most are facing social and psychological problems in campus. While social aspects were stronger than physical ones, both affect the overall person-place bond. Inventories of effects of design of campus would help to explore the influence of various predictors on place attachment. Therefore the challenge now is to ascertain the actual level of attachment in campus before embarking into more related complex and multidisciplinary social and physical studies. The aim of this study to investigate the level of emotional place attachment of international students and the manner its affect their educational experiences in Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) main campus. For this reason, a 5-points Likert-Scaled questionnaire survey on 336 UPM international students and data analysis using SPSS were conducted. Results demonstrate that the international students have a low emotional place attachment towards the campus design which are also affecting their social well-being and psychological health in campus. The result demonstrates that more improvements need to be implemented in the physical design of the campus to support the international students’ sense of place attachment. The result opened the pathway of recognizing the main indicators of emotional attachment towards enriching the international educational experience in UPM through campus design.

Does University Campus Place Attachment Matter Among Transnational Students Keywords:

Place Attachment , Second Home , Transnational Student , and University Campus Design