Community Scale and Resident Attitudes towards Tourism

Given that the costs and benefits of tourism are not uniformly distributed across space, knowledge of how residents perceive tourism both within their own community and from a broader regional perspective is needed to inform tourism-based economic development plans. This study explores the role of physical distance from tourism on resident attitudes, where support for the development of tourism within a person’s town of residence is compared to support for tourism development at the county level. Differences were found across these “community scales” with residents indicating less support for tourism at the, more intimate, town level. To explore this variation, ordered logit regression models identified factors in-fluencing attitudes at the town and county levels