Which construct is better at explaining residents’ involvement in tourism; emotional solidarity or empowerment?

ABSTRACT

Though residents’ involvement is extremely important to foster sustainable tourism, explanations as to why locals become involved are rather scant. This research explores the role that emotional solidarity and empowerment play in explaining residents’ involvement in planning for tourism. We collected a sample of 415 residents residing in three counties highly impacted from tourism in Central Florida – Orange, Osceola, and Seminole. Using structural equation modelling, we found that constructs tested in the model, including welcoming nature, sympathetic understanding, social empowerment, and political empowerment, explained 54% of the variance in residents’ involvement in tourism planning. Furthermore, two relationships including the effect of resident emotional closeness on their involvement in tourism planning and the effect of resident psychological empowerment on their involvement in tourism planning were not significant. Interestingly, standardized regression coefficients were stronger for the two social and political empowerment factors in explaining resident involvement in tourism planning than for welcoming nature and sympathetic understanding factors. Our results thus contribute to empirically-rigorous, holistic modelling of residents’ attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Welcoming nature
• emotional closeness
• sympathetic understanding
• residents’ empowerment
• structural equation modelling
• EQS
• Orlando
• Florida

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).