Local residents are always the recipients of economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts from tourism development. Residents' perceived impacts, attitudes towards tourism and the resultant supportive or opposing actions collectively affect the success of tourism, but are not thoroughly understood especially in small regions with rapid growth. The study investigated how the tourism impacts receive local perception, determine local attitudes and in turn lead to active or passive supportive action. The predisposition of linkage between attitude and behaviour is explored with the underlying aspects of impacts. Through the establishment of hypotheses of the relationship and an empirical survey-based study in Urlaubsregion Murtal (URM) in Austria, findings from local populations suggest that local attitude is significantly influenced by tourism impacts. In particular, socio-cultural impacts influenced attitude to a greater extent than the economic and environmental dimensions. The overall prevalent residents' attitude in the URM is highly positive as the respondents indicated a sense of openness towards tourism development and the vast majority agreed that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. A significant positive relationship between attitude and support is detected. However, the residents also intended to act more passively than actively to supporting tourism development, but the connection from attitude to specific active or passive actions is not apparent.
Chung-shing Chan is a doctoral candidate from the Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His master study was about indicators for sustainable urban park management in Hong Kong, while his current doctoral research studies the potential of green resources for city branding in Hong Kong.
Lawal M. Marafais an associate professor at the Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His teaching and research interests cover leisure and ecotourism, tourism and environment, recreation planning and management.ABSTRACT Over the past decade, place branding has become a vibrant area of research and has received increasingly widespread attention and recognition. Some scholars have discussed that many place branding studies have adopted qualitative and quantitative approaches in analysing collected data and information. This review article aligns the application of research methods and statistical analyses with place branding topic areas in articles published in three key periodicals since the year 2000. A dominance of qualitative research approaches is revealed in most of the specific topic areas in place branding including place identity, projected images, place offerings, marketing and communications, and stakeholder relationships. Several observations are also made about issues that might deserve further attention: (1) the dominance of qualitative analysis, (2) the lack of integrated research approaches and (3) the relatively low explanatory power of statistical applications in some studies. On the basis of the changing research domain in the place branding topic areas, mixedmethod or more diversified quantitative approaches may yield insightful future research opportunities in a field where most research is typically conducted using individual case studies and qualitative approaches.Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2013) 9, 236-253.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.