The Research On Residents’ Perception And Expectation Of Impacts Of Rural Tourism

Rural tourism destinations had often been researching home and abroad. Residents are very important Stakeholders in tourism destination, their perceptions and support for tourism play a crucial role on sustainable development of tourism destination. Study results indicate that each case study is influenced by different types and levels of tourism impacts, these tourism impacts are showed by residents’ perceptions, expectation, attitudes and support, becoming the starting point and goal of empirical study. Meanwhile, because of the heterogeneity of destination communities, there are differences in residents’ perceptions of tourism impact, when residents’ positive perceptions exceeds the negative perceptions on the whole, the destination community support the development of rural tourism.Expectation decides locals’ objectives of participating tourism, influences participants’ enthusiasm, and residents’ expectations are closely related to residents’ perceptions, their economic dependence and other indexes. There is little research on rural tourism impacts and rural tourism destination’ stage of the life cycle starting from the view of perceptions and expectations of residents. Based on these, the main contents and conclusions are as follows:(1) Surrounded by related theories and conclusions about residents’ economic dependence on tourism, perceived impacts and expectations of tourism development, from the theoretical framework of the subject-object interaction and community participation theory this article extracts residents’ economic dependence index of the factors affecting residents’ involving in tourism; main influencing factors of residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts from social exchange theory developed by Ap, et al and Tourism Area Life Cycle model proposed by Butler; and influencing factors of residents’ expectations to tourism development from expectations theory. Through organic integration of tourism, sociology theoretical perspectives, combined with multiple regression(path) analysis method of structural equation modeling from the study of psychology, the foundation for empirical research is laid.(2)Through visiting and doing questionnaires of rural tourism community in Zhenjiang New District, the article projects the main influencing factors of economic dependence, perceptions and development expectations which case destination presents to residents, establishes hypotheses of relationship between the factors by theories and builds structure prediction model.( 3) In the analysis of data, Firstly the relationship analyses of every population’s socio-demographic variables’ crosstabs indicate that the economic dependence of residents is low totally; Secondly, the locals’ economic dependence on tourism is highly relevant to their expectations to tourism development; Thirdly, environmental concerns factor has the greatest impact on the influencing factors of residents’ expectations, and totally residents’ perceptions of personal income and external positive impacts have greater impact on residents’ expectations than other aspects. From the quantitative analysis of Tourism Area Life Cycle model, we know that the tourism destination in the involvement stage of Tourism Area Life Cycle.In the conclusion of the study, according to the main factors affecting residents’ expectations to tourism development and the main features of the case destination which in the involvement stage, the article tries to put forward a number of suggestions to promote the sustainable development of the case destination.