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Xiaoping Gu is a Lecturer in the Department of Tourism Management at Shenyang Agricultural University, LN, PRC. She received her PhD in Ecology from Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the intersections of ecotourism and local community development around protected areas in China, and how tourism destinations provide incentives for conservation by assessing tourists’ behavior. She is also interested in tourist motivation and tourism resources management.
The purpose of the research presented here was to empirically assess resident perceptions of tourism development around the Changbai Mountain Biosphere Reserve (CMBR), a protected area straddling the China and North Korea border. Several theoretical approaches to the assessment of local resident attitudes towards tourism were reviewed and integrated into a novel factor-cluster assessment of residents in Erdaobaihe, the community most adjacent to CMBR. This analysis quantitatively grouped residents based on their perceptions of tourism’s economic, social, cultural, and environmental consequences for the town. An exploratory factor analysis of resident perceptual items first revealed six perception domains, and a subsequent cluster analysis then identified four distinct groups of residents based on these perceptions. A descriptive profile of each cluster and the significant differences among clusters are provided. Advancing our theoretical understanding of resident perspectives of tourism development, this cluster-based segmentation approach, demonstrated here, holds much promise for elaborating on the many ways that residents respond to new and long-standing forms of tourism in their communities. These theoretical and methodological contributions will be applicable to scholars as well as tourism practitioners and policy makers.
Xiaoping Gu; Carter Hunt; Michael Lengieza; Lijun Niu; Huiwen Wu; Yue Wang; Xiang Jia. Evaluating Residents’ Perceptions of Nature-Based Tourism with a Factor-Cluster Approach. Sustainability 2020, 13, 199 .
AMA StyleXiaoping Gu, Carter Hunt, Michael Lengieza, Lijun Niu, Huiwen Wu, Yue Wang, Xiang Jia. Evaluating Residents’ Perceptions of Nature-Based Tourism with a Factor-Cluster Approach. Sustainability. 2020; 13 (1):199.
Chicago/Turabian StyleXiaoping Gu; Carter Hunt; Michael Lengieza; Lijun Niu; Huiwen Wu; Yue Wang; Xiang Jia. 2020. "Evaluating Residents’ Perceptions of Nature-Based Tourism with a Factor-Cluster Approach." Sustainability 13, no. 1: 199.