Residents Travel Significant Events Perceived Characteristics And Attitudes Of Empirical Research

Research background. Mega-events, such as World Expo, Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup, are gaining rising popularity in the world, thus leading to more and more academic researches in this field. Scholars and researchers attach great importance to the economic, socio-cultural and evironemtal impacts of mega-events. These impacts directly affect local residents' lives. Residents are both the direct participants and the potential tourist of a mega-event, so their perceptions of and attitudes toward mega-events are critical to the success of a mega-event. Only when their perceived benefit exceeds their perceived costs, will a resident support the mega-event and become an active participant in it.Theoretical and practical significance. This paper helps thoroughly understand residents' perceptions of and attitudes toward mega-events, which is significant in building up harmonious relationship between tourists and residents, between community development and tourism development, and between community prosperity and economic prosperity. Meanwhile, this paper puts forward some practical suggestions on public policies and marketing strategies which could be guidances for the practice of holding mega-events.Creative points. This paper creatively builds up the scales and models for research residents' perceptions of and attitudes toward mega-events, and proveds methodologies for researches in mega-events.Data source and methodology. In-field investigations conducted between July, 2007 and Febrary, 2008, through distributing questionnaires among Shanghai residents, are the major source of the data analyzed in this paper. With SPSS 14.0 version, this paper analyzed the data through factor analysis, cluster analysis, correlation analysis and ANOVA, and finally verified the assuptions put forward early in this paper.Five chapters composes of this paper.Chapter one deals with the introduction of researches on residents' perceptions on and attitudes toward mega-events. It includes the research background, significance of this topic, research procedures and the creativeness of this paper. Furthermore, the research content, methodologies, and the definition, characteristics, history and current situation of World Expo are also discussed within this chapter. Chapter two makes a literature review on the residents' perceptions on and attitudes toward mega-events from the following perspectives: mega-event related researches, tourist impacts, residents' perceptions, and residents' attitudes.Chapter three studies the theoretical aspects of residents' perceptions on and attitudes toward Shanghai World Expo. Two major theories used in present academic researches are introduced: social exchange theory and social representative theory, the former of which fits better with the situation discussed in this paper and thus adopted as a main theoretical guidance here. Seven hypotheses are also put forward to formulate a theoretical framework for this research.Chapter four presents the empirical study of Shanghai residents' perceptions on and attitudes toward the 2010' World Expo. Questionnaires were distributed among residents in Shanghai in a convenience-sampling way, and data are analyzed according to the hypothesis presented in chapter three. This part first introduces methodologies used in this paper to process the data, then it comes up with the research results and findings of this research, and at last it verifies the hypothesis according what have been found. In research results,Chapter five suggests the marketing strategies and public policies according the research findings, analyzes the limitations of this research and gives a further look into the future research fields.Conclusions. Residents' evaluation over World Expo's social benefits are generally high, their evaluation over World Expo's social costs are neutral, which is lower than the former one; The frastructures of the factors of residents' perception over social benefits and social costs are also built up; Residents' overall attitudes toward the 2010 Shanghai World Expo are positive; Demograghic characteristics of residents relates to their attitude toward the 2010 Shanghai World Expo; Residents' attitude relates positively with their perceptions over social benefit, and negatively with their perceptions over social costs.Limitations. This paper should improve its time length of investigation and the representativeness of the case.