What does the community have to say? The role of expected impacts, affect, political trust, and justice in tourism attitudes and intentions

The primary purpose of this dissertation was to test the relationships among antecedents (i.e., expected tourism impacts, affect, political trust, and perceived justice), attitudes, and behavioral intention. The secondary purpose was to test the heterogeneity of residents' attitudes toward local tourism development. To accomplish these aims, three separate articles were included.;Based on social exchange theory (Gursoy & Rutherford, 2004; Lee & Back, 2006; Perdue, Long, & Allen, 1990; Yoon, Gursoy & Chen, 2001), the first article focused on the expected tourism impacts-attitude-behavioral intention relationship. Results of structural equation modeling showed that among four kinds of expected tourism impacts, only socio-environmental benefits and economic benefits were positively related to attitudes toward future tourism development. Similarly, many, but not all of the expected tourism impacts contributed to the prediction of behavioral intentions; and, three significant paths were in an unexpected direction.;In the second article, political trust/distrust and justice were added into the resident participation model to incorporate the utilitarian and normative conformity perspectives. This was done due to the fact that residents may be utilitarian driven and influenced by social norms and principles as well. Results suggested that the relationships between attitude toward current tourism development and intentions were fully mediated by attitude toward future tourism development. The same finding applied to the relationships between expected tourism benefits and intentions. In addition, the relationships between political trust/distrust and intentions were partially mediated by attitude toward future tourism development. Further, four paths were in an unexpected direction.;The third article focused on expanding understanding of predictable community subgroup differences in attitudes toward local tourism development. Three clusters of residents were identified based on cluster analysis of seven attitude items. The results showed that relationships between antecedents (i.e., expected net tourism impacts, political trust, justice and affect), attitude and intention and composite means of constructs differ to some degree across groups.;Taken together, these results suggest that utilitarian and value based processes both contribute to the understanding of the formation of tourism attitudes and behavioral intentions. Further research is needed to explore the effects of affects in the whole model. Other related issues recommended for future research are to explore the selective information process and dissonance effect in the community participation model.