Cultural tourism in rural communities: The residents' perspective

Cultural tourism develops at a considerable speed and diversifies continuously in a multifaceted way. It constitutes not only the base for the booming European city tourism but acts move and move as an instrument for fostering tourism in rural areas. The main objective of this hind of policy is to maintain or improve the quality of life of the local people. The theoretical background for this development is outlined briefly in the introductory section of this article. The empirical part analyzes the impacts of a particular hind of cultural tourism (exhibition tourism) us perceived by local residents in several small rural communities of Styria, Austria. This study examines the psychometric characteristics of the tourism impact and attitude scale (TIAS) developed by Lankford and Howard. The added domain of psychosocial impacts is shown to adhere to a distinct dimension of environmental influences. This extended TIAS model was tested for structural stability over two consecutive measurement moments and shifts in the mean scores of the latent constructs by means of structural equation modeling. In addition, background variables were regressed-first separately then aggregated to community attachment scores-against the two latent dimensions of tourism impacts to find explanations for variations in attitudes. The four-quadrant model of Bjorklund and Philbrick of social impacts was applied for elucidating the perceptual shifts from the initial to the follow-up study period. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.