Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

Dr. Cathy H.C. Hsu is a Chair Professor in the School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research includes tourist motivation, service quality, and branding, focusing on Mainland Chinese travelers in recent years. She received the 2009 John Wiley & Sons Lifetime Research Achievement Award.

Dr. Xiang (Robert) Li is a professor and Washburn Senior Research Fellow at the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Temple University. Robert's research mainly focuses on destination marketing and tourist behavior, with special emphasis on international destination branding, customer loyalty, and tourism in Asia.

Dr. Nan Chen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include destination marketing, consumer behavior, and event management.

Abstract (150 Words)

Understanding how residents view and react to tourism development is an important topic in tourism literature. To date, most studies focused on the formation and change of locals’ attitudes, whose predictive power to behaviors remains controversial. This study proposes “resident sentiment” as a more encompassing concept to describe local residents’ overall views of tourism development, with attitude as a constituent part. Further, the research team suggests two levels of sentiment: individual sentiment being an internal disposition shaped mainly by private encounters, and public sentiment being shared feelings and reactions resulted from dynamic, multilateral interactions among people. Guided by social exchange and social representations theories, personal experience, social interactions, and destination characteristics are proposed as potential sources of individual sentiment, and mass and social media as a proxy of a community’s public sentiment. A model is proposed to illustrate the determinants and consequences of resident sentiment and interrelationships among key variables.

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Resident Sentiment: Preliminary Conceptualization and Measurement

Understanding how residents view and react to tourism development is an important topic in tourism literature. To date, most studies focused on the formation and change of locals’ attitudes, whose predictive power to behaviors remains controversial. This study proposes “resident sentiment” as a more encompassing concept to describe local residents’ overall views of tourism development, with attitude as a constituent part. Further, the research team suggests two levels of sentiment: individual sentiment being an internal disposition shaped mainly by private encounters, and public sentiment being shared feelings and reactions resulted from dynamic, multilateral interactions among people. Guided by social exchange and social representations theories, personal experience, social interactions, and destination characteristics are proposed as potential sources of individual sentiment, and mass and social media as a proxy of a community’s public sentiment. A model is proposed to illustrate the determinants and consequences of resident sentiment and interrelationships among key variables.