Residents' Perceptions of Tourism Impacts: An Analysis of Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation

Abstract

Investigating residents' perception of tourism impacts is a good method to analyze the status of tourism impact. Due to the underlying correlation among several impacts indices, tourism impacts are generally very complex to model. Various methods such as single-variable and statistics used in previous authoritative studies are not sensitive enough, which may affect the decision-making process adversely. The purpose of this research is to present the fuzzy synthetic evaluation method to analyze residents' perceptions of tourism impacts. Basic attributes and a hierarchical framework of tourism impacts are defined and formed. Then weighted vectors are determined according to the knowledge and experience of experts. The weighted evaluation matrices are then aggregated to get the fuzzy sets of tourism impacts. In the final stage, the final fuzzy sets are defuzzified to get the rank of residents' perceptions of tourism impacts. Sensitivity of fuzzy synthetic evaluation is quite high compared to other index evaluation techniques. A case study in Jiuzhaigou National Park of China is provided to demonstrate the application of this method. The findings clearly indicate that the fuzzy synthetic evaluation may successfully harmonize inherent complex conditions in residents' perception of tourism impact.