Tourism Planning and Development

Dr. Emrullah Erul

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of how the emotional solidarity scale (ESS) (comprised of three unique factors: welcoming nature (WN); emotional closeness (EC); and sympathetic understanding (SU)) and theory of planned behavior (TPB) (comprised of three unique factors: support for tourism development (STD); subjective norms (SN); and perceived behavioral control (PBC)), are effective and powerful in predicting residents’ intentions to support for tourism development. To date, the ESS has been used as a predictor of the attitudinal measure of support for tourism development. However, no work has focused on ESS serving as a predictor of behavioral intention, and no study has extended the TPB model by including residents’ emotions which shows the importance and uniqueness of this study. The proposed study intends to close this literature gap and draw the attention of tourism scholars by using the ES theoretical framework along with TPB to predict residents’ behavioral intentions to support tourism developments. Confirmatory factory analysis of the model revealed not only good fit but also strong psychometric properties for each factor. Based on the structural model, results demonstrated that residents' emotional solidarity with tourists explained 45% of the variance in support for tourism development, and in turn, this support along with perceived behavioral control and subjective norms explained between 42% of the variance in factors comprising residents’ behavioral intention to support for tourism development. Findings provide support for the complementary use of the two theories as limitations and future research are offered.

Short Bio

Emrullah Erul, Ph.D. completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences (RPTS) at Texas A&M University, USA. His research interests concern residents’ attitudes toward tourism and tourism development, residents' perceptions of the impacts of tourism in the local communities, social-cultural and economic impacts of tourism, impacts of all-inclusive resorts, tourism planning and development, residents’ support for tourism development, medical tourism, Airbnb, sustainable tourism and tourism marketing.

Venue

Friday, May 31, 2019 at 14.00

Sümerbank Building, Dean Meeting Room