Developing and Testing a Tourism Impact Scale

A 35-item tourism impact scale was developed. It was de rived from an initial pool of 147 impact items drawn from personal interviews and the literature, and it was refined us ing classical scale-development procedures. The scale com prises seven domains: social and cultural, economic, crowd ing and congestion, environmental, services, taxes, and community attitudes, although the latter two domains did not always emerge as independent factors. Testing was under taken with three independent samples drawn from communi ties exhibiting different tourism characteristics. The scale was demonstrated to have dimensional distinctiveness and stability, internal consistency, content validity, and conver gent validity. Tourism impacts were assessed by measuring both belief and affect toward the impact attributes.