Exploring Contexts of Place: The Role of Setting and Activity in a High-amenity Tourism Community

Abstract Sense of place is built upon the meanings people create as they experience the places in which they play, work and live. These place meanings can be setting-based, representing actual places of interaction; or they can be activity-based, characterizing places where people recreate. This paper uses a methodological approach based on a quantitative analysis of resident-employed photography to explore these two contexts and their role in the construction of sense of place. Specifically, we conduct a series of multiple discriminant analyses of two distinct photographic data sets – one gathered from residents of a high-amenity, tourism-dependent community in Southern Alaska (representing the setting context), and one gathered from a group of volunteers in a recreational natural resource management programme (representing the activity context).