Resident Attitudes

Urban greenways are receiving increased attention due to the implications they have for the sustainable development of 21st century cities. Although preferences of greenway users have been heavily investigated, research on residents' perceptions of living in close proximity to these greenways pales in comparison. With this gap in mind, residents living within two socioeconomically different neighborhoods adjacent to the Atlanta BeltLine Trail were surveyed about common neighborhood concerns and how the BeltLine's development alleviates or exacerbates these concerns. By simultaneously asking residents about both neighborhood concerns and the BeltLine's impact on these concerns, modified Importance-Performance (IPA) graphs were created with four quadrants depicting where the BeltLine is successful and areas where it has aggravated problems. From the 381 responses received, the top five most important neighborhood concerns were crime, property taxes, vandalism, property values, and places for outdoor recreation. The BeltLine was perceived by residents to be improving property values, places for outdoor recreation, and social spaces for gathering, while slightly increasing litter, crime, vandalism, and property taxes. This can be seen on the graphs where most of negatively connoted concerns fell in the " Concentrate here " quadrant with the positively connoted concerns falling in the " Keep up the good work " quadrant. T-test results revealed that the affluent Northside neighborhood viewed the impacts of the trail as more positive than the transitioning Southwest neighborhood. Results suggest that greenway planners should tailor greenway development projects towards individual neighborhoods as they are likely to have different concerns and expectations of urban greenways.

Researchers have recently begun to explore residents' perceptions of short-term vacation rental (STVRs) from both qualitative and quantitative approaches, but there is still a need for strong theoretical underpinnings to support this growing body of research. This study addresses this gap through applying a theoretical perspective that combines Social Exchange Theory and Weber's Theory of Formal and Substantive Rationality to assess residents' attitudes towards STVRs in the U.S. city of Savannah, Georgia. Results from 384 resident surveys revealed that support for STVRs was a function of both the costs and benefits associated with STVRs, as well as perceived Social and Psychological Empowerment from STVR development. These findings highlight the need for regulatory approaches that ensure STVRs do not infringe on residents' sense of community and that STVR activity reflects the values and norms of residents so that STVR visits induce resident pride in their neighborhoods.

This study expands Perdue, Long, and Allen’s (1990) original model
of resident attitudes toward tourism in two significant ways. It first
proposes Weber’s theory of formal and substantive rationality
(WFSR) as a way to strengthen social exchange theory. Secondly,
WFSR is operationalized by using the Resident Empowerment
through Tourism Scale (RETS) as substantive antecedents and the
Personal Economic Benefit from Tourism Scale as a formal antecedent
influencing resident attitudes. Ten of 14 hypotheses were confirmed,
with Psychological Empowerment and Personal Economic Benefit having direct and positive effects on Support for Tourism. Implications include recognition of the importance of tailoring destination marketing and management efforts to empower residents psychologically, socially, and politically.

As the body of work concerning emotional solidarity between residents and tourists
continues to grow within the tourism literature, little focus has been placed on how
the setting factors into such relationships. Using the Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove
(a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southwestern Nigeria) as a study site, this
research examines the role visitors’ attachment to the place plays in explaining
their perceived solidarity with area residents. From confirmatory factor analysis, a
measurement model was established, which revealed strong psychometric properties
for the two place attachment factors (i.e., place identity and place dependence) and
the three emotional solidarity factors (i.e., feeling welcomed, emotional closeness, and
sympathetic understanding). Structural equation modeling demonstrated that each of
the place attachment factors explained a high degree of variance (e.g., R2 ranging
between 45% and 54%) in visitors’ emotional solidarity with residents. Implications
and future research opportunities are offered within the close of the article.

While gender equality and empowerment are core components of sustainable tourism, most of the literature has approached the concepts from qualitative perspectives, thus limiting the ability to empirically test for empowerment discrepancies between men and women. With this gap in mind, this study sought to test the widely held notion that empowerment
discrepancies exist between men and women in tourism development. Discrepancies in psychological, social and political empowerment were tested for using the 12-item Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS). The RETS was administered across five sample populations, with
results revealing that gender discrepancies were present, but surprisingly, not in the direction suggested in previous literature. In all three US samples, there was evidence that women were more likely to perceive themselves
being empowered than men. The results from the two Japanese samples did not find any significant differences, which is of interest because Japan is traditionally seen a very patriarchal society. Applications of the RETS can be paired with qualitative research to better understand empowerment success stories and then to apply these best practices to other destinations
where empowerment discrepancies are present. Future applications of the RETS are suggested to help initiate “gender mainstreaming” within the sustainable tourism literature.

At the core of the resident attitude literature is the general understanding that the more residents economically benefit from tourism, the more they support tourism. While a central tenet, previous research has measured resident perceptions of economically benefiting from tourism somewhat haphazardly, using four disparate directions without a common cross-culturally reliable and valid scale. To bring clarity to the literature, this study develops and presents the Economic Benefit from Tourism Scale as a reliable and valid measure for the resident attitude literature to embrace. The scale's development follows Churchill's recommendations and uses three separate data collections across the United States of America and Poland to purify the scale and demonstrate its validity within an international context. Both samples prove the scale to be construct valid with maximum weight alphas in the .85 to .90 range, standard factor loadings all above 0.60, and average variance extracted estimates between 57% and 69%.

With the empirical research on resident empowerment in its infancy, this study sought to add to the scant literature by testing the cross-cultural validity of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) within the town of Oizumi, Japan. Such a destination was chosen because it provided a culture vastly different from the original rural Virginia, U.S. sample across Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed on the Oizumi sample (n = 456) demonstrated that the RETS and its factors of psychological, social, and political empowerment were construct valid and shared the same psychometric properties originally found in Boley and McGehee's study (2014). These findings from the Oizumi, Japan sample support the international applicability of the RETS and provide managers with a valid tool for tracking the effectiveness of their marketing and management efforts aimed at increasing resident empowerment.

While resident empowerment has been a central aspect of the sustainable tourism literature, difficulties of putting the concept into practice have been noted given the heterogeneous nature of communities. “Community” is often divided by kinship, age, gender and ethnicity, and such division may influence the perceptions of empowerment. The goal of this study was to better understand heterogeneous perceptions of empowerment by administering the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale within the community of Oizumi, Japan. Oizumi has the highest concentration of Brazilian immigrants in Japan, and the town has embraced “ethnic neighborhood tourism” centered on Brazilian culture as a strategy for economic development. Oizumi's demographic makeup allowed for testing differences in perceived empowerment between members of the dominant ethnic group (Japanese) and members of the ethnic minority group (Japanese Brazilians). Analysis of 650 completed questionnaires revealed that Brazilians felt more psychologically and socially empowered than Japanese residents, indicating a shift in the balance of power between the ethnic groups. Results also revealed that the political dimension of empowerment was rated relatively low among both groups, suggesting a general lack of opportunities to participate in the planning process. Implications for both practice and theory are presented.

This research note highlights the novelty of integrating Location-based services (LBS) available on Smart Phones and Tablets into traditional resident attitude survey methodologies such as door-to-door data collection.  It specifically reviews how the LBS technology available on mobile devices can be used to systematically capture GPS coordinates of one’s residence and integrate this captured spatial information into software such as ArcGIS and SPSS for further analysis.  By having GPS coordinates associated with respondents’ answers, researchers have an additional layer of information available for conducting a multitude of tests previously not possible with subjective categorical spatial data.  Two research applications using the spatial location of residences are provided as examples of how LBS available on mobile devices can be integrated within resident attitude projects. The use of LBS technology can help researchers better understand how the distance residents live from major tourist attractions influences their attitudes towards tourism.

Development of tourism destinations require cooperation of local authorities and local people as well as the tourism investors. Otherwise, tourism development can result in irreversible environmental impacts when solely viewed as economic benefits, without considering sustainability. Therefore, determining how tourism is perceived and how open to tourism the local people are play a major role in the impact of investments and sustainability of tourism in the destination. In this vein, this study aims to examine residents’ attitudes toward possible tourism development in Kapısuyu Village. Kapısuyu Village in Bartın, Turkey was selected as the study site due to its natural and cultural resources and its location in the Kure Mountains National Park which allows visitors to enjoy various recreational activities. In line with the study objectives, the study analyses how the local people in “Kapısuyu” perceive tourism, what they think about tourism development in their village, what attitudes they develop and their willingness to support tourism development. To achieve the study objectives, semi-structured in-depth interviews were made with the local residents in “Kapısuyu”. Conclusions were drawn on the basis of study findings.

With the maturation of the resident attitude literature beyond its initial atheoretical focus (Belise & Hoy, 1980), resident “Support for Tourism” has become the ultimate dependent variable of interest for researchers. While almost every resident attitude regression and structural equation model include some measure of “Support for Tourism,” there is little agreement over which measures are best and which ones are the most reliable and valid. For example, Perdue, Long, and Allen (1990) measure the construct using a single item while more recent articles tend to use multiple items but disagree over the number to use and how to best word the items. This can be seen in Gursoy, Jurowski, and Uysal’s (2002) use of a 2-item scale, Nunkoo and Ramkissoon’s (2012) inclusion of a 4-item scale, Wang and Xu’s use of a 5-item scale and McGehee and Andereck (2004) measuring Support for Tourism using of a 9-item scale. These are only four examples but they demonstrate the many divergent approaches used to measure the construct. This type of diversity in measuring “Support for Tourism” significantly hinders the ability of resident attitude researchers to compare findings across communities and use advanced statistical techniques such as meta-analysis to identify universal trends and compare effect sizes of different antecedents (Hunter & Schmidt, 2004).

With this gap in mind, this research note seeks to revise Woosnam’s (2012) nine item “Support for Tourism Development” scale into a more parsimonious measure of “Support for Tourism” that resident attitude researchers can rally behind and collectively use within future data collection efforts. The research note proceeds by presenting how a combination of Churchill’s (1979) and Rossiter, 2002 and Rossiter, 2011 recommendations for scale development were followed to revise and test the proposed “Support for Tourism” scale (STS) within two international settings (i.e., U.S. & Poland).