Residents' Attitudes Towards Toursim Impacts

The tourist destination is a complicated and integrated system, which includes tourists, tourism developers, tourism operators, local governments, local residents. It is beneficial to focus on the residents in terms of a coordinated and sustained development of the economy, social culture and environment in tourist destinations.This thesis takes Luodai Ancient Town as a case study of destination residents' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism impacts. Firstly, it summarizes the research results relevant to ancient towns and their residents' attitudes, and then analyses the data from the questionnaires, with the software SPSS 13.0. Secondly, based on the analysis and some theories, the residents' perceptions and attitudes toward Luodai Ancient Town are concluded. Furthermore, a comparative study of the residents' perceptions and attitudes is made according to human demographics, like age, sex, profession, education, income, etc. Finally, it gives the conclusions of the residents' perceptions and attitudes towards tourism impacts of Luodai Ancient Town, and with regard to these impacts, some suggestions are thereby raised.The thesis is divided into four chapters. In Chapter I, the author explains two important concepts in the thesis: tourism impacts and residents' perceptions and attitudes, and also introduces the structure, methods and significance of the thesis as well as the progress in the relevant research of ancient town tourism and its tourism impacts. In Chapter 2, the author interprets four theories and makes a summary about the factors which affect the residents' attitudes. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are the main parts of this thesis. In Chapter 3, the author analyses the residents' perceptions and attitudes toward the tourism impacts of Luodai Ancient Town. In Chapter 4, a conclusion is made about the residents' perceptions and attitudes toward tourism impacts of Luodai Ancient Town. The conclusions are : (1) in general, the residents are more likely to perceive positive tourism impacts than negative ones; (2) economic impacts from tourism development are significantly stronger than cultural and environmental impacts to local residents; (3) there are some differences among the residents' perceptions and attitudes in Luodai Ancient Town. At last, several suggestions about future tourism development are made.