Date of Award

8-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management

Committee Chair/Advisor

Matthew Browning

Committee Member

Cedomir Stanojevic

Committee Member

Brandi Crowe

Committee Member

Winifred Newman

Abstract

Environmental psychology studies how the physical environment shapes cognition, affect, and behavior. The procedural reforms that have addressed the replication crisis in other branches of psychology presuppose that a study's stimulus can be specified, archived, and shared with sufficient precision that another team can re-run it. Environmental psychology's stimulus is the environment itself, which cannot be uploaded to a repository, which raises practical replication issues. The field's replication issue is therefore not a deficit of will but a missing layer of infrastructure that the field might not have had.

This dissertation argues that virtual reality (VR) could empower environmental psychology by enabling control over the stimulus and by allowing it to be shared across sites and over time. Realizing these requires a software and hardware research infrastructure that the field has yet to build. This dissertation reports the construction and evaluation of such an infrastructure through a Research-through-Design (RtD) inquiry.

EchoSphere is a replication-oriented VR research infrastructure built on consumer-grade standalone hardware and an OpenXR/Unity software stack. It was developed, deployed and tested in three deployment studies. Version 0.1 was used to deliver a dyadic nature-based VR intervention to hospice patients and family caregivers in their homes. Version 0.2 supported a single-participant study of college students on the autism spectrum that combined eye tracking with continuous wearable physiological measurement. Six design lessons were learned across these two deployments and motivated v0.3, in which stimulus, procedure, and capture configuration are bound into a single versioned package, session control is via a declarative specification interpreted by the headset runtime, and multimodal data capture runs on a timestamped pipeline with a live preview and control.

The fourth cycle provides the most direct empirical test. An urban street perception study originally conducted at Peking University in 2022 (N = 107) was re-conducted at Clemson University in 2026 (N = 56) using EchoSphere v0.3 and the Modular Urban Street Environment (MUSE), a parametric scene module developed for this dissertation. The replication preserved the factorial design (street width × aspect ratio × vegetation), the within-subjects structure, the subjective measures, and the analysis pipeline of the original. The analysis showed that the two-factor subjective structure (Spatial Perception and Emotional Comfort) recovered almost identically across sites; main effects of aspect ratio, vegetation, and width pointed in the same directions; and a Vegetation × Childhood Setting moderation appeared at both sites, with a larger Tree-related positive perception among participants who grew up in rural areas. The Clemson deployment was run by a single operator, where the original had required a four-person team.

This dissertation proposes a replicable framework for environmental psychology organized around four phases of the research cycle: planning, implementation, reporting, and aspiration. The framework adapts existing open-science recommendations with a dedicated recommendation for environmental psychology across all methodological paradigms, including survey, laboratory, and in-situ designs. This dissertation serves as one example of how the framework's more complex requirements can look in practice.

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-9805-0158

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