Resident Perceptions of the Economic Benefits of Tourism: Toward a Common Measure

Abstract

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%.

Environmental and Economic Concerns in Residents’ Attitudes in Punta del Este (Uruguay)

“…This implies an increase in various economic aspects. The tourism sector increases economic activity, which entails more employment opportunities for residents and newcomers [1,3,5,14,30,39,42,58,101,105,106]; this same growth in economic activity generates an increase in business initiatives led by residents or external investors [5]. More indirectly, public administrations improve their income via taxes and fees thanks to increases in demand, the number of companies, and people with employment [3,25,105,106].…”

Modeling Residents’ Attitudes toward Short-term Vacation Rentals

“…These items mirror issues covered in local news sources stemming from STVR development in Savannah such as impacts on the physical appearance of neighborhoods (Curl 2016) and parking (Ritchey 2014). The Personal Economic Benefits from Tourism construct is a four-item scale adapted from Boley, Strzelecka, and Woosnam (2018). This scale seeks to measure residents’ perceptions of economically benefiting from the presence of STVRs in their neighborhood.…”

“…One main ubiquitous finding in resident attitude research is that the more residents benefit economically from tourism, the more they tend to support the tourism industry (Boley, Strzelecka, and Woosnam 2018; Jurowski, Uysal, and Williams 1997; Látková and Vogt 2011; Madrigal 1993; Perdue, Long, and Allen 1990). STVRs have the potential to bring direct positive and negative economic impacts to residents.…”

Resident Perceptions of Distribution, Recognition and Representation Justice Domains of Environmental Policy-Making: The Case of European Ecological Network Natura 2000 in Poland

“…To develop the measure, we name the Perceived Environmental Justice Scale (PEJS), we followed Churchill's (1979) steps for developing reliable and valid scales and combined them with Rossiter's (2002) focus on establishing content validity (as in Boley, Strzelecka, and Woosnam 2018).…”

“…We gave special attention to items that adversely affected the reliability and validity of the sub-scales. Specifically, we considered deletion of items based on (1) the strength of their factor loading, (2) the item effect on dimensionality, (3) the effect of the item's deletion on Cronbach's alpha, and (4) redundancy with other items (as in Boley, Strzelecka, and Woosnam 2018). At the end of the revision process, the measurement instrument (PEJS) included 13 items defining the distribution domain, 10 items defining recognition, and 13 items defining representation (in total 36 items).…”