10.1177/004728702237423NOVEMBER 2002JOURNAL OF TRAVEL RESEARCH Tourism and Social Change: The Case of Israeli Ecotourists Visiting

This study evaluated the role of tourism as an agent of change between two countries that have been traditionally hostile to each other—Israel and Jordan. Fifty Jewish Israeli ecotourists who traveled to Jordan for the first time were asked to complete a structured questionnaire that measured attitudes toward Jordanian people, their political beliefs, and their institutions. Each tourist was asked to complete the questionnaire before leaving for Jordan and after returning home. A control group of Israeli ecotourists who did not go to Jordan was also asked to complete the questionnaire twice. The results showed that the tourist experience that the Israeli ecotourists encountered significantly altered their opinions and attitudes toward the Jordanian people and their institutions, in the positive direction. Overall, of 33 atti-tudinal statements, 15 (45.4%) show a positive change as a result of the tourist experience, while none of the attitudes changed in the negative direction. This study is about the ability of a specific type of tourism— namely, ecotourism—to induce social change, especially change in the attitudes of travelers between countries that are unfriendly to each other. In the past three decades, tourism has been portrayed as an agent of social change that can introduce into host and guest societies significant sociocultural changes. Changes in the social structure, values, norms, opinions, and attitudes of both tourists and residents who interacted with each other have been reported in numerous cases occurring in different parts of the world. These changes were found to occur in par-ticular when the sociocultural and economic differences between the tourists and their hosts were significant (Anso