A number of studies in recent years have been performed to identify residents' perceived impact of tourism development and the factors that affect them. Residents' attitudes toward tourism development is an area of increasing interest to tourism manag...
A number of studies in recent years have been performed to identify residents' perceived impact of tourism development and the factors that affect them. Residents' attitudes toward tourism development is an area of increasing interest to tourism managers, public policy makers, and academicians. A major reason for this rising interest is that the research literature has demonstrated, at least to some, that tourism development has some considerable negative and positive outcomes at local level.
The broad aim of this study was to demonstrate structural casuality between residents' perceived tourism impact and attitudes toward host community. This study extends the subject of tourism impact to community satisfaction and integrated structural model of its casual relationships.
Primary data were collected by questionnaire survey during three weeks in 1997 in Cheju-Island area of Republic of Korea. Cheju, the largest and southernmost of peninsula of Korea, is island of 1,845.6 square kilometers with a population of 523,736 people in 1996. Cheju-Island is famous tourism destination of which a volume of 4 million visitors to the Cheju, and tourism expenditures were $700 million.
A total of 38 middle school were selected for survey with PPS sampling method. A total of 732 questionnaire were completed by residents of which 84 percent were 30-49 years old.
Using data from a survey, a set of proposed integrated model and 9 hypothesis of casual relationships derived from theoretical and existing research literature review are evaluated using structural equation modeling(e. g., AMOS) and other method.
The proposed integrated model was revealed that establishment of composition and casualty with constructs and measurement variables was adequate. Although the χ^(2) remained high in .the model, other measures indicated moderately good fit(Table 4-32). This model can be provided a systematic and straightforward framework for evaluating relationships between residents’ perceived tourism impact and attitude toward host community. Only, the casual relationship(hypothesis # 3) of personal benefit from tourism development and perceived negative tourism impact(; negatively relationship) was failed to support the result of previous study. Other hypothesis were supported with highly or marginal significant level.
The major findings of this study are summarized as follows;
First, It is necessary to access that tourism development is a methodological perspective or a procedural mean for community development. In the results of hypothesis test, residents' highly perceived positive tourism impact was positively influenced to highly overall community satisfaction. But, highly overall community satisfaction was negatively influenced to support for additional tourism development. And, as the results of regression analysis, perceived positive tourism impact together with community attributes was major predictor to explain the overall community satisfaction.
This fact implies that tourism impact is very important sources to the satisfaction and non-satisfaction in the community of tourism destination, but tourism development is not goal of community.
Second, 'personal benefit from tourism development' and 'situational characteristics with related the perception of tourism and regional development' are important criteria to understand the difference in 'perceived tourism', 'community assessment', and 'attitude for additional tourism development.' Each construct was explained by the other factors of 'highly benefited' or 'lowly benefited', and was differed from 'highly related perception group' or 'lowly related perception group.'
This fact implies that the differences both benefit from tourism development and situational characteristics are the major issue to tourism and community management, development, policy, and this field study.
Third, residents' perceived tourism impact was closely correlated to the attitudes toward host community. And, an integrated approach of structural casualty was very useful to understand residents' attitudes toward tourism development and host community. Therefore, tourism impacts and attitudes toward host community can not be segregated in community of objective settings of tourism destination.
This fact can be contributed to provide the ground of an integrated tourism and community development policy, and this field study.