Abstract (150 Words)
This study investigates factors predicting property owners’ (both full time residents and second home property owners) support for tourism development in an amenity-rich mountain county in North Carolina. Different from most place-based research in tourism attitudes, this work adopts a comparative framework that investigates the spatial effects on tourism impact attitude. Factor analysis is used to reduce the number of variables in order to avoid the effect of multicollinearity and to identify the primary structural dimensions underlying the variables. The results showed that spatial effects did exist in accessing property owners’ attitude toward tourism and that the spatial regression model indeed did have better performance in terms of fit, efficiency and accuracy than the ordinary least square model. The findings of the study are discussed within the context of social exchange theory.
Factors Predicting Property Owners’ Support of Tourism --- A Spatial Approach
This study investigates factors predicting property owners’ (both full time residents and second home property owners) support for tourism development in an amenity-rich mountain county in North Carolina. Different from most place-based research in tourism attitudes, this work adopts a comparative framework that investigates the spatial effects on tourism impact attitude. Factor analysis is used to reduce the number of variables in order to avoid the effect of multicollinearity and to identify the primary structural dimensions underlying the variables. The results showed that spatial effects did exist in accessing property owners’ attitude toward tourism and that the spatial regression model indeed did have better performance in terms of fit, efficiency and accuracy than the ordinary least square model. The findings of the study are discussed within the context of social exchange theory.
