Abstract
This study examines local residents’ place attachment (PA) to the city or town they live and investigates how this attachment influences their perceptions and support for tourism development (ST), as well as comparing the differences of these relationships among the city and town residents in a linear World Heritage Site (WHS) setting. Structural equation model was used to analyze samples of 226 city residents and 235 town residents along the Grand Canal Yangzhou Section, China. The findings suggested that residents’ PA is positively correlated their ST. Results also suggested that the PA-ST effect is partially mediated by residents’ positive perceptions in the city area while fully mediated by residents’ positive and negative perceptions in the town areas. This study could help local governments make heritage development and management policies accordingly for cities and towns along the Grand Canal area.
Highlights
Human has psychological ties to places, which have been studied and supported by humanistic geographers and environmental psychologists for decades [1]
confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed on the combined group (461 samples), the city group (226 samples) and the town group (235 samples) separately with the four first-order subscales of Place Attachment (PA) and the other three constructs of PP, Negative Perceptions (NP) and support for tourism development (ST) in order to assess whether the measurement model accurately reflect the desired seven constructs based on the maximum likelihood estimation
This research utilized the concept of place attachment for understanding the bonding between local residents and their living place, and studied how it affects residents’ perceptions and support for tourism development
Summary
Human has psychological ties to places, which have been studied and supported by humanistic geographers and environmental psychologists for decades [1]. Scholars interpreted this phenomenon through people’s incrementally attaching meaning and experiences to places [2]. A series of concepts and models were proposed and developed to further investigate people’s relationship with places, such as place identity [3], place attachment [4,5], sense of place [6], rootedness [7], etc. The concept of place attachment was initially associated with people’s home environment such as their residences or neighborhoods [1], and it was adopted in the recreation and tourism related research [9]. Most tourism studies focus on visitors’ place attachment to certain travel destinations [10,11] and how it relates to visitors’ fee spending attitudes [12], site
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