Sustainable tourism development (1)

Hello, everyone. In the previous sections, we learned how to write the qualitative and quantitative research papers. And in this section, we would like to demonstrate how to conduct a mixed method research. Here are two papers I would like to share with you and to demonstrate how to conduct mixed method research. These two papers actually are from one big project funded by the Hong Kong (China) government and are about measuring the social and economic sustainability in Hong Kong.

Here is the background of the study. Hong Kong is a world leading tourism destination, attracting people from different countries over the world every year. Actually Mainland China is the top source market for Hong Kong. And if we have a look of this figure here, here shows the arrivals from Mainland China from 1995 to 2016. And from data here, we can see the number of tourists keep increasing, and here it declines a little bit. And if you have a close look here, here and this year, we have some big increase and some decline across the years, actually that was called by the visa issues.

For example, in 2003, we carried out the Individual Visitor Scheme, which means the tourists can hold the visa and travel independently without joining in the tour. In that case, the number of tourists jumped dramatically here. And during the financial crisis 2009, we have another visa released policy, which is the one-year multiple-entry visits, which means if you’re from the several spot cities in Guangdong province, you can hold a visa and travel as much as you can to Hong Kong. Actually, after that was taken out, a huge increase of tourists from Guangdong province, including many smugglers . And as you can imagine, those Hong Kong residents, they can have very negative attitudes.

So they went out on the street and did a demonstration to try to stop this visa. Actually, in this situation in 2015, they try to restrict the visa. Actually, it exchanges to one week one entry. So, you can see from the number, it declines a little bit. And for Hong Kong, social and economic sustainability is quite a big issue for tourism development. As we know, a mainland Chinese tourists account for more than 75.5% of the total tourist arrivals in 2016. And those kind of Visa issues also influenced arrivals from Mainland China. In that case, Hong Kong is facing a very serious problem towards the tourism development.

And we know the tourism development also always brings some social effects to the destination. For example, the tourism development can increase the prices of consumer goods and the properties, also it may bring some cultural conflicts between tourists and locals. Exactly, the use of public resources may also be reported from the public in destination and disturbing the ways of life of local residents Regarding the economic effects of tourism development, even though many of the effects are positive, for example, increasing their GDP and contributes to a local welfare. Actually, there are still some negative points, for example, those economy leakages and also the short term economic value for those destinations.

So facing those problems, our team set those research objectives for this project. So our objectives are to develop and validate a social and economic sustainability measurement instrument, and to provide practitioners with the opportunity to evaluate social and economic sustainability from the perspective of host communities. Here is the literature review. At the first beginning, we review the literature about the sustainability in tourism. A kind of definition from the UNWTO (1995), sustainable tourism is a tourism development that simultaneously meets the needs of present tourists and host regions as well as protects and increases the opportunities for future prosperity.

And we also review some literature is from the social and economic aspect of the tourism sustainability. After that, we realized many research, actually they measured the social and economic aspect. However, there’s a limited particular study focusing on the social or economic aspect. In that case, we would like to provide a comprehensive view and also from the community perspective. And also we found it’s really hard to find a measurement of social or economic sustainability from the existing literature. Most of the existing measurement about tourism sustainability is very general, including all the aspect of the sustainable tourism.