Residents’ bond with the city and its influence on the evaluation of changes taking place in the city

This article presents the results of a study carried out as part of the project ‘City Observatory – a platform for cooperation between the academic community and the surrounding area’, in six cities of three voivodeships of Eastern Poland – Białystok, Lublin, Rzeszów, Suwałki, Biała Podlaska and Krosno. The three capitals of the Podlaskie, Lubelskie and Podkarpackie Voivodeships and three cities from these voivodeships, which lost the status of voivodeship cities as a result of the administrative reform of 1999, were selected for the study. The study involved 11,397 respondents, from three groups of respondents: parents/guardians of primary and lower secondary school pupils, secondary school pupils and students. The main aim of the article is to determine the level of residents’ bond with the city in retrospect, based on a set of statements (items) built on a five-point Likert scale, and to identify variables that differentiate the respondents’ bond with the city in a statistically significant way. The research showed that the strength of residents’ bond with the city influences their assessment of the quality of life in the city and the changes taking place in it. The level of residents’ bond with the city is influenced by the gender of the respondents, membership of the research group – parents, students, pupils and the fact of being a city resident or city user.