Measuring empowerment in an eastern context: Findings from Japan

•Cross-cultural validity of Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) tested.•Cross-cultural validity of RETS confirmed in Oizumi, Japan sample.•CFA found RETS to have construct, convergent, discriminant and nomological validity.•RETS presented as cross-culturally valid scale to measure resident empowerment.•RETS confirmed a tool for managers to assess resident perceptions of empowerment.

With the empirical research on resident empowerment in its infancy, this study sought to add to the scant literature by testing the cross-cultural validity of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) within the town of Oizumi, Japan. Such a destination was chosen because it provided a culture vastly different from the original rural Virginia, U.S. sample across Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed on the Oizumi sample (n = 456) demonstrated that the RETS and its factors of psychological, social, and political empowerment were construct valid and shared the same psychometric properties originally found in Boley and McGehee's study (2014). These findings from the Oizumi, Japan sample support the international applicability of the RETS and provide managers with a valid tool for tracking the effectiveness of their marketing and management efforts aimed at increasing resident empowerment.