Local Residents’ Perception Of Relative Deprivation In Rural Ecotourism Destinations

As an important form of ecotourism, rural ecotourism has become a key developing direction of tourism industry and a new hotspot of tourism research. However, local residents’relative deprivation issues has become increasingly serious in many rural ecotourism destinations, which is to a great extent harmful to the harmonious and healthy development of tourism. Compared to the rising momentum of rural ecotourism and relative deprivation issues, relevant research is quite limited. As one of commonly qualitatively research method, Grounded Theory proved to be a scientific method in constructing theory to reveal complicated social phenomenon. Thus, this paper using Grounded Theory approach to qualitatively investigate local residents’sense of relative deprivation and tourism attitude during tourism development by taking Likeng village and Sixi village of Wuyuan county in Jiangxi province as examples.Through a month-long field observation of Wuyuan ecotourism development and 31 in-depth interviews of local residents from Likeng village or Sixi village, the raw data of this research was collected. The data was then analyzed by QSR NVivo 10 through open coding, axial coding, and selective coding process, which aimed to construct grounded theory. The coding analysis generated 53 categories which include "economic deprivation induced by geographical location differences", 10 sub-categories which include "lateral deprivation",4 main categories which include "residents’ perception", as well as the key category of "the mechanism of residents’relative deprivation development". Further analyzing the coding results, this paper constructs a model and proposes 3 paths of the mechanism of residents’relative deprivation development.In the final, this paper compares the differences of residents’relative deprivation between Likeng and Sixi village. Based on the examination of the current situation, causes of relative deprivation issues and its effect on tourism development, several suggestions were proposed to the rural ecotourim development of Wuyuan County.