Research On Residents' Perceptions And Attitudes Toward Tourism In Tourist Destinations

With the increasing of Chinese World Heritages and the development of tourism industry, it has been a developing strategy for local governments to utilize world heritage tourism to boost local economy, create employments, attract investments and so on. While world heritage tourism inevitably generates economical, socio-cultural and environmental impacts to locality, therefore it is essential to investigate local residents' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism and to understand tourism impacts from perspective of residents, which is beneficial not only to control tourism impacts and provide specific references for the management of the world heritages, but also to facilitate the protection of the world heritages. This paper has two goals: one is to compare if residents' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism have significant differences in destinations that have different levels of tourism industry. The other is to test which factors effect resident' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism. This empirical study investigated residents in Pingyao and Lijiang ancient cities. After the T test, cluster analysis and correlation analysis, the findings are that residents' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism of the two world heritage sites exist evident differences; Residents in high level of tourism des(?)ination have stronger perceptions toward negative impacts and have less support toward tourism; Pingyao's residents are grouped into enthusiast, rational lovers and neutrals, while Lijiang's are grouped into certain haters, active supporters and cautious supporters. This paper also finds that education, employment state and personal dependence on tourism are main factors which effect residents' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism.