DEVELOPMENT OF BEHAVIORAL GEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN WESTERN COUUNTRIES AND ITS RECENT PROGRESS
CHAI Yan-wei1, YAN Ya-ning1, OKAMOTO Kohei2
1. Department of Urban and Economic Geography, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;
2. Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan
Abstract Since the ‘quantitative revolution’ in 1960s, there has come a research trend of ‘behavioral’ approach among western geographers. Compared with descriptive spatial-structural analysis of population, the new-born behavioral geography research has been offering geographers a way to consider individual cognition, preference and decision-making as new explanatory variables of human spatial phenomenon, generally by substituting the new behavioral hypothesis of spatial process for the conventional hypothesis of strict ‘utility maximizing’ economic person, which has also shown its powerfulness in dealing with large and complicated data sets generated from questionnaire surveys and individual interviews. Thus, research of behavioral geography has been vigorous not only in the various applied fields, but also in understanding environmental characteristic and its relevance to human agency. However, the epistemological base of behavioral research on pure positivism did not guarantee a true interpretation of the relationship between human psychological aspects and overt behaviors. This in effect impelled behavioral geography to turn to pluralistic integration of the many ‘-isms’ so as to concentrate more on actual human behavior in the real world. And behavioral geographers began to pay more attention to improving both research fields of human congnitive and decision-making sides. By tying up with psychology, GIS science and time geography, behavioral geographers have succeeded in taking into consideration a lot more aspects that moved out of the limited focus on personality and free choice, and have developed new ways to integrate the constraint prospective, to enhance the social relevance of the empirical research, and to shed light on various cognitive schemas which finally lead to a person's cognitive mapping of his/her environment. Furthermore, for the last decade behavioral geographers have been making an effort to understand the holistic way of exchange between continuous activities and the realistic environment, by borrowing the views of transactionalism and ‘affordance’ stemmed from ecological psychology and the ‘every-day’ geography.Even today behavioral geographical researches in the West show much vitality in applications.More researches on cognitive maps, residential preferences, consumer choices, urban structure and daily activity system can also be seen among Chinese academics. Despite the volumes of empirical research, little has been done to thoroughly review the development of western behavioral geography as a whole. Therefore,this article makes a comprehensive review of how western behavioral geography has forged its way and what characteristics recent researches have shown, in order to enlighten behavioral geographical researches in China.
2008, Vol. 23 
