Assessing social capital and community involvement: Social network analysis for the sustainable Amish community tourism development

Conventional model for the community tourism development focused on tourist' expectations or corporate stakeholders' interests and restricted community input and participations in a decision making process. Professional expert research paradigm is dominant in this model in which research is framed, produced and evaluated by tourism professionals. Although alternative models emphasize on community assets, involvement, and collaboration, they still ignored the broader relational dimension of tourism development. They are weak in the aspect how power structure can be challenged or released from one to the other and its relational pattern of structure and representation. Identifying community assets, generating an awareness of tourism implications by utilizing community's relational pattern of structure and empowering community to lead their sustainable involvement are relevant precursors for creating an organizational structure for sustainable tourism planning and development. Community empowerment incorporated limitations of community involvement that are a meaningful degree of participation and having a critical consciousness of power structure. This dissertation finds answers to following three questions concerning community involvement and their empowerment:;1. To what degree, aspects of social relations (theoretically refined as social capital) condition the various levels of community involvement and the sense of empowerment?;This research empirically measured the three dimensions of social capital: cognitive, relational and structural dimensions. This dissertation brought attention to network analysis as a tool in the identification and measurement of three dimensions of social capital.;In terms of cognitive social capital and tourism involvement, perceived benefits of tourism development was positively related to the sense of empowerment. Amish ranked acquisition of additional financial help and building new relationships and maintaining personal relationships with others higher in order to get involved in tourism. In addition, perceived benefit had an influence on the sense of empowerment. The more benefits individuals perceived, the more likely people feel empowered.;Relational social capital explains why people who got involved liked to sustain their involvement. Analysis of network measures found that heterogeneity of ties was important for the initial involvement and confirmed the importance of weak ties in their relations. However, strength of ties played a crucial role for sustaining their involvement. In addition, betweenenss centrality had an influence on tourism involvement. Findings did not support hypotheses concerning structural equivalence of social network. People holding similar structural positions in the Amish tourism network did not show a similar degree of involvement and empowerment in tourism development. However, social position of work demonstrated its influence on the degree of their involvement and empowerment in tourism development. The perceived expectation of their responsibilities had a greater affect on their involvement and sense of empowerment.;2. What strategies and circumstances encourage community involvement, collaboration and empowerment?;Simplified structural pattern can help the community become aware of their communication structure, and where to change to build a better information and resource flow channel. Individuals who are expected to play an active role in community development, and embrace it as part of their overall role, may be more likely to be involved and feel empowered in community development. According to the reactions of tie strength and community involvement, which weak and heterogeneous ties of social relation help the initiation of community involvement while strong ties help sustaining involvement, creating events to build new relations in and out of groups, organizations and communities will be good strategy to get community involved in tourism development.;3. What methods should be used to identify and measure the structural features of social capital and implementation of findings with community?;Action research was incorporated in quantitative methods, qualitative methods, and social network analysis in this dissertation. Action research helps to refine the initial problem statement of the community (advertisement, lack of collaboration mechanism), and improving the local problem-solving capacity (showing them about their structure). At the same time, the researcher's own academic inquiry which was not directly concerned with community's needs and issues was successfully investigated because of the supports of community. Local knowledge, historical consciousness, and everyday experience of the insiders were acknowledged by the qualitative method. At the same time my skills in research procedures, quantitative data that I had access to, and comparative knowledge of the subject were shared with participants. Mixed method was used in this process. It contextualized causal understandings of social phenomena require lenses of both generality and particularity, both objectivity and subjectivity, both patterned regularities and idiosyncratic stories, both policy and advocacy value stances. Data (different people for the same event, different time for the same person) triangulation and methodological triangulation (multiple methods for the same inquiry) were employed to improve the credibility of findings. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...