Identifying Relationships Between People's Perceptions and Physical Components of Sidewalk Environments.

This paper aims to develop a new approach on investigating the relationships between people's perceptions and physical components of sidewalk environments. A psychological survey composed of semantic-differential items isadministered to 112 participants in order to assess their perceptions of 20 sidewalk environments in Iksan City, South Korea. A field survey of theselected sidewalks is conducted to survey the physical components of the sidewalk environments. Because conventional statistical methods are not appropriate due to the qualitative data, small sample size and uncertainty, a new approach based on an artificial intelligence technique - rough sets theory, is applied to deal with the collected data. The application of therough sets theory outputs the most important attributes to people's perceptions, minimal attribute sets without redundancy, and a series of decision rules that represent the relationships between perceptions and physical components of sidewalk environments. The analytical approach helps to better understand people's perceptions to sidewalk environments in a small city and then establish a useful and constructive ground of discussion for walking environment design and management.