Measuring the restorative value of the environment: Contribution to the validation of the Italian version of the Perceived Restorativeness Scale(Misurare il valore rigenerativo dell’ambiente: contributo alla validazione della versione italiana della Perceived Restorativeness Scale)

Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS) validity and reliability has been shown in numerous studies, though results concerning the factorial structure are not consistent. The purpose of this study was to verify the validity and the factorial structure of the Italian translation of the PRS by Peron and Berto (PRS/IT). The scale measures the perception of five restorative qualities of environments: being-away, fascination, coherence, scope, compatibility. To test PRS/IT psychometric characteristics 170 subjects, with age ranging from 19 to 93 years, belonging to three different age groups, were shown a picture of an environment and required to fill in the PRS. Bausell’s method was used to quantify content validity, while an Exploratory Factor Analysis were used to verify the factorial structure. At the same time four judges were asked to rate PRS item pertinence. The main finding of this study is that the Exploratory Factor Analyses yielded a four factor structure where three a priori factors out of five were perceived as separate constructs (being-away, fascination, coherence), whereas two (compatibility and scope) were grouped together. Results showed that the Italian translation of Hartig’s PRS is a reliable instrument that discriminates between-among categories and all items were considered pertinent to measure the construct restorativeness.