Sustainable tourism development (2)

Here is the methodology for this study. This study is to develop a measurement scale for social and economic tourism sustainability. In that case, we follow the procedures developed by Churchill. Actually, we did some changes and add more steps in this one. In our procedures, we have in total ten steps. The first one is to specify the domain of the construct. In that case, we use the literature search to specify our domain of the social and the economic sustainability. For the second step is to generate a sample of items. In that case, we use a literature search and the indepth interviews to generate a pool of items.

The third step, to purify items and design the questionnaire, we use the panel of expert. In the panel, we have five faculty members from the university, and they are all experts in cross-cultural study, especially in China. We try to refine our questionnaire by using the pilot study and also we get some suggestions back. So we revised our content accordingly. The fourth step is to collect the data, which is now a main survey and we used the telephone interviews. The first step to explore the dimensionality of those items or of this measurement, we use the EFA to to do that.

And also we employ the CFA to confirm those dimensionality, generated from the EFA and also have different techniques to ensure we have a good reliability and validity.

And the last step is to assess the factor structure stability. We want to know is the structure we got from the EFA and CFA is stable enough, or it will change in different sample size or different samples. In that case, we try to randomly split our sample into two parts. And we do the same procedure again in different sub samples and in our main samples, and to ensure the structures stay the same. Here’s the qualitative part of our mixed method research that mainly involves the in-depth interviews.

Actually, to get some professional views from the industry, we asked twelve interviewees from the industry, and they are the major stakeholders in the Hong Kong tourism industries, including, for example, Travel Industry Council, Travel Tourism Board, the Quality Tourism Service Association, also some big attractions like Ocean Park, Disneyland, and also most importantly the local residents and also the China National Tourism Administration. They’re all involved to provide some professional advice to our scales. For the quantitative parts, we start from data collection. For our mixed way, we employ the telephone interview and also the computer assisted telephone interview. So in that case, the total number of their telephone numbers is 53,000.

And finally, we have the complete interviews for 1,839, which is good enough for us to do the scale development. And here’s the findings. The first part is about demographic profile of all the respondents. Among those, 1839 respondents, we ask the information regarding the gender, marriage status, education level, work status, industry occupation and their monthly personal income. And here’s our main findings. So here’s all the dimensions we got after different procedures and to represent social and economic sustainability in tourism. In particularly, for the social aspect, we have three major dimensions. There are the host-guest conflict, the social tolerance, the last one is social acceptance.

For the economic ones, we have the development control, we have the economic positivity and also the individual welfare. And here the tables we got in the papers to show all those items under each of the factors. And this is for the social aspect. And this represents the economic aspect. Here is the discussion. So in this study, actually in the two studies, we identified six dimensions of social and economic sustainability in tourism. And this is one of the pioneer studies in this area to specify the details and also got those voices from different stakeholders.

And with those findings, we can help the tourism planners and policy makers evaluating the current development of the tourism industry, and also in developing a appropriate strategies that support a balanced tourism development. And we also think it’s a good idea to keep this running every year, like to keep monitoring the development stage of tourism in the destination. Here’s the conclusion. In this study, we follow the ten step measurement development procedure and try to develop our rigorous measurement for the social and economic aspects of the tourism sustainability. A total of 1839 respondents we got back and we used those data to do the analysis to generate six dimensions representing the social and economic aspects.

This study accesses the pioneering tools for assessing the social and economic sustainability in particular. And we also provide some guidance for those tourism policy makers and also the operators to maintain a sustainable tourism development in the destination. And that’s the end of this session. Hopefully we can get a better understanding of different research method and also how to conduct different research following different approaches. Thank you.