Environmental Psychological Assessment for High-rise Residents in Bangkok Metropolitan Area: Safety Concern, Privacy Satisfaction, and Sense of Community

Due to a large population size and spatial limitations of urban environments, the vertical expansion of city space including high-rise habitat has become an inevitable pathway for the metropolises all over the world. Likewise, Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand and one of the most extreme primate cities in the world, the number of the population residing in high-rise building has expeditiously augmented. Despite the four decades of high-rise housing development in Thailand yet the empirical research echoing the consequences of living in high-rise has gone out of focus.
This quantitative study conducted during 2014 and 2016 contributed to assessing and analysing the mental status of the dwellers residing in the physical environment of high-rise buildings in the urban context of Bangkok. The three psychological domains defined as the dependent variables comprised 1) safety concern, 2) privacy satisfaction, and 3) sense of community. Presumptively, these three underlying feelings of homeyness were influenced by the two primary independent variables, which were the physical environmental factors and the personal factors as well as the interdependencies amongst them were speculated. Methodically, the multi-stage sampling technique was administered in consideration of recruiting 1,206 respondents living in the eighteen highrise buildings located in the six different zones of Bangkok metropolitan area, namely, 1) Northern Bangkok, 2) Central Bangkok, 3) Southern Bangkok, 4) Eastern Bangkok, 5) Northwestern Bangkok, and 6) Southwestern Bangkok. The two interdisciplinary research instruments: the Physical Environmental Assessment (PE) and the Personal and Environmental Psychological Questionnaire (PEP) were invented specifically for collecting data from the field.
The research hypotheses and sub-hypotheses were tested and accepted at the 95% confidence interval (significant level of 0.05). In consideration of urban scale, the result of the field survey and statistical analyses revealed the remarkable differences of the psychological status of the dwellers living in the different contexts of city zoning, land use policy, and density of population. The architectural indicators contained in the PE assessment, namely, 1) defensible characteristic, 2) privacy supportive characteristic, and 3) communal characteristic of the high-rise housing, were substantiated as the essential factors varying the three psychological dependent variables. Furthermore, the personal attributes and the psychological indicators: 1) experience of threats, 2) privacy need, and 3) social capital and participation, were also statistically affirmed to have distinctive effects on these three variables.
Conclusively, the research findings along with the analytical outcomes confirmed the pattern of the psychological mechanism, which identified the interdependencies amongst safety concern, privacy satisfaction, and sense of community of the high-rise inhabitants in the context of the urban Bangkok.