The importance of tourism impacts for different local resident groups: A case study of a Swedish seaside destination

The aims of this paper are to explore the ways an importance measure can contribute to resident attitude research and to describe and analyze the results among different local resident groups. Traditional measures on resident attitudes fail to include this evaluative component, which limits the scope of our understanding of resident attitudes. A stakeholder perspective is applied to illustrate how permanent residents and second home owners rate the importance of different tourism impact items, including economic, sociocultural and environmental impacts. Combined with traditional measures of residents' attitudes, this approach can help improve management of tourism destinations. The importance measure is validated using tests of convergent and discriminant validity and a confirmatory factor analysis. The importance measure testing, which was conducted in a Swedish seaside resort destination, reproduces attitudinal differences between permanent residents and second home owners that were found in earlier studies. However, it also highlights the moderating effect of residents' local involvement, which alters the relationship between type of residency and importance of tourism impact items. The conclusion is that, rather than residency type, local involvement has a greater significance when discussing the attitudes of different resident groups.