The purpose of this study was to conduct a research on the change of regional inhabitants' attitude towards economic, social, and environmental effects caused by the social changes due to the development of tourism. To achieve the purpose, review of l...
The purpose of this study was to conduct a research on the change of regional inhabitants' attitude towards economic, social, and environmental effects caused by the social changes due to the development of tourism. To achieve the purpose, review of literature and survey research were carried out.
Firstly, review of literature was carried out focusing on the concept of the attitude of regional inhabitants and its change in response to the development of tourism.
Secondly, research items were prepared by the result of the review of literature. Based on the items a survey was implemented to find out the changes of regional inhabitants' attitude towards the effects of tourism development.
The results of the survey can be summarized as follows.
Firstly, the heaviness of traffic was the most conspicuous effect of environmental changes concomitant with tourism development. And the increase of alcohol consumption was the most prominent social and cultural change. The economic change was that the gap between the wealthy and the poor was widened.
Secondly, the effect of tourism development which the regional inhabitants felt most strongly was the damage of natural environment, that is environmental effect. The response about most serious damage was environmental pollution. And the most beneficial effect was the expansion of public services. The dominant attitude of the inhabitants towards tourism development was indifference, which was followed by the feeling of happiness. This result suggests that the regional inhabitants' adoption of the tourism development is still on the initial stage. Even though inhabitant's responses were somewhat diverse from quite positive to neutral depending on the items, the overall attitude turned out to be quite positive to the development.
Thirdly, the first hypothesis that the environmental change caused by tourism development affect regional inhabitants' attitude was partly validated.
The second hypothesis of cultural change had meaningful effects on the dependent variable of regional inhabitants' attitude, so it was partly validated..
The third hypothesis, the contribution of tourism development, had been proved to have meaningful effects on regional inhabitant's attitude. The damaging effects were adopted as they were, which turned out to have negative effects to regional inhabitants' attitude.
This study suggests that upcoming research on the attitude of regional inhabitants towards tourism development should comprise various ages, and include regional inhabitants of nation-wide representative tourism sites.