Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

B. Bynum Boley is an Assistant Professor of Natural Resources, Recreation and Tourism within the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. His research interests largely focus on sustainable tourism with a specific interest in the unique natural and cultural resources of tourism destinations.

Marianna Strzelecka is an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Tourism within the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of North Texas. She is especially interested in socio-political aspects of sustainable tourism and rural community development.

Kyle M. Woosnam is an Associate Professor in Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences at Texas A&M University, USA. His research interests concern social-cultural and economic impacts of tourism, resident-tourist interactions within tourist destinations, and sustainable tourism development and planning.

Abstract (150 Words)

At the core of the resident attitudes literature is the general understanding that the more residents benefit financially from tourism, the more they tend to support it. While this relationship is a central tenet of the resident attitude literature, previous research has approached the measurement of resident perceptions of economically benefiting from tourism rather haphazardly using four disparate directions without a common reliable and valid scale. With this in mind, this study seeks to develop the Economic Benefit from Tourism Scale (EBTS). The scale’s development follows Churchill’s (1979) recommendations for scale development and uses three separate data collections across the United States of America and Poland to purify the scale and demonstrate its reliability and validity within an international context. Results from the confirmatory factor analyses confirm the EBTS’ international validity. Suggestions for how to include the scale within future data collections to strengthen Social Exchange Theory are presented.

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Measuring Resident Perceptions of Economically Benefiting from Tourism

At the core of the resident attitudes literature is the general understanding that the more residents benefit financially from tourism, the more they tend to support it. While this relationship is a central tenet of the resident attitude literature, previous research has approached the measurement of resident perceptions of economically benefiting from tourism rather haphazardly using four disparate directions without a common reliable and valid scale. With this in mind, this study seeks to develop the Economic Benefit from Tourism Scale (EBTS). The scale’s development follows Churchill’s (1979) recommendations for scale development and uses three separate data collections across the United States of America and Poland to purify the scale and demonstrate its reliability and validity within an international context. Results from the confirmatory factor analyses confirm the EBTS’ international validity. Suggestions for how to include the scale within future data collections to strengthen Social Exchange Theory are presented.