Effects of residents' tourism development expectation and tourism impacts perception on their attitude towards tourism in natural tourist destination: A Comparative study between China's Jiuzhaigou and the UK's New Forest National Parks

Abstract

Local residents' perception of tourism impacts in tourist destinations has been found to affect their attitude towards tourism; however, there have been relatively few studies on the influence of residents' tourism development expectation on their attitude towards tourism. With the utilization of SPSS16.0 software, this paper, taking China's Jiuzhaigou and the UK's New Forest National Parks as case study areas, makes a comparative study on the influence of local residents' tourism development expectation and touirism impacts perception on their attitude towards tourism. And potentially possible reasons for the influence and the differences between these two cases have been conducted with a qualitative analysis. Some conclusions can be obtained as follows. (1) Local residents' tourism impacts perception, especially tourism benefit perception, directly influences their support of tourism development. (2) Tourism development expectation of local residents directly influences their tourism impacts perception, espetially their tourism benefit perception, and indirectly influences their attitude towards tourism development in the parks via the medium of tourism benefit perception. (3) Residents in both destinations hold positive tourism development expectation with minor differences between the two cases due to cultural differences. Tourism benefit perception of local residents in the two national parks is less and worse than their tourism development expectation, indicating that there is a great gap between their tourism development expectation and tourism impacts perception in these two case study areas. But the majority of local residents in these two parks still hold no negative attitude towards local tourism development in spite of the existing gap