engleski

The social impacts of tourism on local community's quality of life

Understanding the residents’ attitudes towards social impacts of tourism is essential for achieving wellbeing that directly implicates local community’s support for quality tourism development. Purpose – To develop a model of residents’ attitudes, examining not only perception of social impacts of tourism, but also the path relationships between perception of personal benefits from tourism development, community involvement, positive and negative social impacts of tourism, quality of life and support for further tourism development. Methodology – To achieve the main purpose of this research, Cronbach’s alpha, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) were applied. Since the purpose of the research was to explore relationships between different pairs of variables as a whole, the path analysis was implemented in order to determine the direction and significance of these relationships. Findings - The findings indicate that both personal benefits from tourism development and community involvement have significant effects on positive social impacts of tourism and can affect the quality of life and support for tourism development. Although both positive and negative social impacts of tourism have considerable effects on quality of life and support for tourism development, the effects from positive social impacts are much stronger than from the negative ones. Contribution - Since the issue of residents’ attitudes is an under-researched topic in the Republic of Croatia, the main contribution of this paper is the actualization of this important matter.

residents’ attitudes, social impacts of tourism, quality of life, tourism development support

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