Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS)

1. Abstract

The Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS), developed by Samuel V. Lankford and Dennis R. Howard in 1994, is a seminal psychometric instrument designed to assess host community residents’ perceptions of and attitudes toward tourism development. Across municipal planning, destination management, and environmental sociology, understanding resident sentiment is essential for developing sustainable tourism policies. The TIAS evaluates resident perspectives across two overarching evaluative dimensions: perceived personal and community benefits (including economic diversification, tax generation, recreational infrastructure, and cultural exchange) and perceived negative impacts or concerns regarding community stability (such as traffic congestion, environmental degradation, increased living costs, and cultural disruption), alongside critical considerations of citizen involvement in local governance. Comprising 27 standardized items, the instrument employs a five-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly Agree”). Extensive psychometric evaluation across diverse rural, regional, and urban destinations has demonstrated robust internal consistency, with overall scale reliability estimates consistently exceeding Cronbach’s alpha of .90, and subscale coefficients ranging from .78 to .93. Factor analytic investigations reveal robust construct validity, exhibiting stable multi-factor structures and acceptable convergent and discriminant validity across international replications. Grounded theoretically in Social Exchange Theory (SET), the TIAS provides empirical clarity on how resident cost-benefit appraisals drive public support for or resistance to tourism growth, making it a foundational assessment benchmark in sustainable community development and hospitality research.

2. Keywords

Tourism Impact Attitude Scale, TIAS, resident attitudes, tourism development, Social Exchange Theory, sustainable tourism, community impacts, destination management, psychometrics, scale validation, perceived benefits, community disruption

3. Authors

The Tourism Impact Attitude Scale was formulated and psychometrically validated by:

• Samuel V. Lankford, Ph.D. — Professor and researcher in recreation, parks, and tourism administration, historically affiliated with the University of Northern Iowa, California State University, Fresno, and the University of Hawaii. Dr. Lankford has contributed extensively to environmental planning, community tourism initiatives, and outdoor recreation management.
• Dennis R. Howard, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Sports Marketing and Commercial Recreation within the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. Dr. Howard’s scholarship focuses on public policy, facility financing, community support for commercial leisure, and visitor economy impacts.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS) is to provide an empirically grounded, reliable, and standardized measurement protocol for assessing host community perceptions regarding the socio-economic, cultural, and environmental impacts of tourism development. Prior to the formal introduction of the TIAS by Lankford and Howard in 1994, literature addressing resident attitudes was heavily criticized for methodological fragmentation, utilizing ad-hoc, unvalidated questionnaires lacking construct stability, generalizability, and rigorous psychometric testing. The TIAS was engineered specifically to address these methodological deficits by establishing an objective baseline against which destination planners, social scientists, and local municipal authorities could evaluate public support or opposition.

From a research perspective, the TIAS serves as an operational tool to test structural and sociological models of resident support for tourism. It enables investigators to examine how demographic characteristics, length of community residency, spatial proximity to tourism corridors, economic reliance on visitor spending, and perceived political empowerment influence attitude formation. In destination management and municipal governance, the scale functions as a diagnostic instrument. By systematically measuring resident attitudes before and after major capital projects, seasonal tourism peaks, or policy interventions, planning agencies can identify community friction points, such as perceived recreation displacement or tax increases, and implement targeted mitigation strategies. The ultimate objective of the scale is to foster participatory, sustainable destination governance that balances visitor attraction with community wellbeing.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the TIAS encompasses resident attitudes toward tourism development, conceptualized as a multi-dimensional cognitive and affective evaluation of how visitor-related growth influences individual livelihoods and broader community welfare. Within psychometrics, attitudes are operationalized as psychological tendencies expressed through evaluating an entity with some degree of favor or disfavor. Within the TIAS, this evaluative orientation manifests across distinct sub-dimensions:

• Perceived Economic and Community Benefits: This dimension assesses residents’ perceptions regarding the developmental advantages of tourism, including municipal revenue expansion, employment creation, commercial diversification, and infrastructure improvements (e.g., parks and recreational facilities). Items capturing this dimension evaluate cognitive appraisals that tourism enhances the overall standard of living and regional economic security.
• Perceived Concerns and Disruptive Impacts: This sub-construct captures the perceived negative externalities associated with visitor inflows. It reflects cognitive assessments of community costs, encompassing environmental degradation (littering, ecosystem strain), social infrastructure burdens (traffic congestion, noise pollution), perceived increases in criminal behavior, elevated local costs of living, and the disruption of peaceful domestic environments.
• Community Identity and Cultural Influence: Beyond direct economic trade-offs, this dimension evaluates affective and socio-cultural orientations toward heritage preservation and community image. It addresses whether tourism is viewed as strengthening local pride and cultural opportunities or eroding traditional community character and values.
• Citizen Empowerment and Planning Involvement: This factor measures residents’ perceived self-efficacy and agency within civic decision-making processes. It assesses whether local citizens feel they maintain an active voice in municipal planning or whether tourism agendas are perceived to be driven unilaterally by outside commercial interests at the expense of local constituents.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Tourism Impact Attitude Scale is rooted in Social Exchange Theory (SET), synthesized with elements of Stakeholder Theory and cognitive appraisal models. Social Exchange Theory posits that human interactions, civic cooperation, and socio-political attitudes are predicated on subjective cost-benefit calculations. When applied to host communities, SET asserts that residents evaluate tourism development through the lens of reciprocal trade-offs: individuals and communities willingly support tourism initiatives to the extent that the perceived rewards (economic vitality, enhanced amenities, social vitality) exceed the perceived costs (congestion, environmental degradation, increased living expenses).

According to SET framework postulates developed by theorists such as George Homans and Peter Blau, an exchange relation persists only when both parties experience equitable or net-positive returns. If host residents perceive that the benefits of tourism accrue primarily to non-local corporate developers or municipal treasuries while the local population bears the uncompensated negative externalities (such as diminished recreation access or rising property taxes), an exchange imbalance occurs. This psychological asymmetry induces negative affective states, resulting in civic opposition, anti-tourist sentiment, and resistance to municipal development proposals. The TIAS operationalizes these reciprocal trade-offs, allowing researchers to calculate composite cost-benefit equations that accurately predict civic behaviors, voter support for bond measures, and community hospitality toward incoming visitors.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the TIAS was established through extensive empirical procedures across both initial scale construction and independent replication studies:

• Content and Face Validity: Lankford and Howard (1994) initiated scale development with an extensive pool of over 60 prospective items derived from comprehensive literature reviews and expert panel feedback comprising tourism planners, sociologists, and community leaders. Successive rounds of qualitative screening eliminated ambiguous, redundant, and double-barreled items, ensuring that the remaining 27 items accurately reflected the theoretical domains of community impact and civic participation.
• Construct and Convergent Validity: Construct validity has been confirmed through strong correlations with parallel measures of community satisfaction, political participation, and economic dependency. Empirical research demonstrates that individuals directly employed in tourism or commercial services exhibit significantly higher scores on the TIAS benefit dimensions compared to non-dependent residents, supporting convergent expectations derived from Social Exchange Theory.
• Discriminant Validity: Multitrait-multimethod approaches and structural equation modeling (SEM) have demonstrated that the perceived positive and negative dimensions diverge appropriately, exhibiting average variance extracted (AVE) metrics exceeding shared inter-construct squared correlations. This confirms that positive community support and perceived disruption represent distinct psychological constructs rather than polar ends of a single continuum.
• Predictive Validity: The scale has exhibited substantial predictive validity in forecasting actual voting behavior on local tourism zoning referenda, resident willingness to pay for local tourism infrastructure, and supportive behaviors toward incoming visitors.

8. Reliability

The TIAS demonstrates high levels of internal consistency and scale reliability across varied population samples and environmental contexts:

• Internal Consistency: In their foundational 1994 study involving over 1,000 residents across multiple communities in the Pacific Northwest, Lankford and Howard reported an overall scale Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .96, indicating exceptional internal consistency. Subsequent studies assessing the 27-item instrument and its validated sub-dimensions have routinely reported alpha values ranging from .82 to .94 for the perceived benefits/support subscales and .79 to .89 for the perceived concerns and negative impact subscales.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the validation samples predominantly fell between .45 and .78, exceeding the standard .30 threshold and confirming that each item reliably reflects the underlying construct.
• Test-Retest Stability: Sub-sample evaluations utilizing 4-week to 6-week test-retest intervals have demonstrated temporal stability coefficients ranging from .76 to .88, establishing that the scale captures enduring community attitudes rather than transient situational reactions.

9. Factor Analysis

During the initial psychometric validation of the TIAS, Lankford and Howard subjected the 27 items to Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using principal component extraction and varimax rotation. Early unconstrained solutions suggested an overarching general factor alongside distinct secondary dimensions. When forced into multi-factor configurations to aid contextual interpretation, the items consistently segregated into distinct latent constructs explaining over 55% of the total cumulative variance:

• Factor 1: Community Promotion and Support for Development (accounting for the largest portion of explained variance), characterized by heavy loadings (> .60) on items advocating local government intervention, economic promotion, and municipal commitment to remaining in the tourism industry.
• Factor 2: Negative Environmental and Social Externalities, capturing high loadings on items assessing crime increases, traffic congestion, loss of tranquility, and recreation displacement.
• Factor 3: Economic Diversification and Employment Benefits, marked by high loadings on job creation, local business stimulation, and municipal tax diversification.
• Factor 4: Citizen Empowerment and Voice, distinguished by specific loadings on perceived involvement in municipal planning and personal agency in development decisions.

Subsequent Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) performed across international datasets (e.g., in Mediterranean coastal resorts, rural Midwestern towns, and Caribbean island communities) have validated hierarchical and correlated multi-factor representations. Across structural models, fit statistics routinely achieve acceptable benchmarks: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .92, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .065, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .058, confirming structural stability across diverse socio-cultural landscapes.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS)
• Authors: Samuel V. Lankford and Dennis R. Howard (1994)
• Target Population: Adult residents (aged 18 and older) living within host communities, tourism corridors, or areas undergoing tourism planning.
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire (paper-and-pencil, online survey platform, or intercept interview).
• Item Count: 27 standardized items.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral / Neither Agree nor Disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree).
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Unidimensional Scoring: Negative impact items (Items 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22) are reverse-coded (1 → 5, 2 → 4, 3 → 3, 4 → 2, 5 → 1). A grand mean or composite sum is computed, where higher scores reflect more favorable overall attitudes toward tourism development.
  • Multidimensional / Subscale Scoring: Items are aggregated into distinct subscale indexes (e.g., Perceived Benefits, Perceived Negative Impacts, Citizen Involvement) without reverse scoring, preserving diagnostic clarity on specific resident concerns.
• Completion Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Tourism Impact Attitude Scale was formally published in 1994. The scale items were placed within the public domain for non-commercial academic research and municipal planning applications through publication in the Annals of Tourism Research. Researchers, educators, and municipal analysts may utilize the instrument without royalty fees, provided proper academic citation is accorded to the original authors (Lankford & Howard, 1994). Commercial consulting firms or organizations planning proprietary, revenue-generating applications should seek direct authorization from the copyright holder of the journal publication or the primary authors.

12. References

Lankford, S. V., & Howard, D. R. (1994). Developing a tourism impact attitude scale. Annals of Tourism Research, 21(1), 121–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(94)90008-6

Ap, J. (1992). Residents’ perceptions on tourism impacts. Annals of Tourism Research, 19(4), 665–690. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(92)90060-3

Andereck, K. L., & Vogt, C. A. (2000). The relationship between residents’ attitudes toward tourism and tourism development options. Journal of Travel Research, 39(1), 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/004728750003900104

Gursoy, D., Jurowski, C., & Uysal, M. (2002). Resident attitudes: A structural modeling approach. Annals of Tourism Research, 29(1), 79–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(01)00028-7

McGehee, N. G., & Andereck, K. L. (2004). Factors predicting rural residents’ support of tourism. Journal of Travel Research, 43(2), 131–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287504268234

Nunkoo, R., & Ramkissoon, H. (2012). Power, trust, social exchange and community support. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(2), 997–1023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.11.017

13. Items of the Scale