Community Participation In Cultural Heritage Tourism In Lijiang Old Town, China
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Date
2015-02
Authors
HUIBIN, XING
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Abstract
Community participation has been regarded as an indispensable strategy to realise
the sustainable tourism in cultural heritage destinations. However, in developing
regions, the community participation is very pessimistic in practice, although the
importance has been stressed in academia since the 1980s. Hence, this research is
deemed timely to focus on the community participation in cultural heritage tourism
to realise four research objectives: [1] to investigate the current situation of
community participation in cultural heritage tourism; [2] to identify the relationship
between independent factors of participation and the participation in the development
process of cultural heritage tourism; [3] to determine the barriers of participation and
independent variables in assessing the process of community participation in cultural
heritage tourism; and [4] to establish assessment model of community participation
in cultural heritage tourism. This research is carried out based on a survey at Lijiang
Old Town, China, which is one of the most representative cultural heritage
destinations. A total of 384 valid questionnaires were collected from the respondents
sampled from the community residents in Lijiang Old Town from May to June 2012
and from January to February 2013. The data analyses were implemented through
IBM SPSS Statistic 22.0 by classifying the process into four steps mainly using
descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, factor analysis, and regression analysis.
Based on a series of data analyses, this research achieves findings mainly in four
aspects: [1] community residents participated in cultural heritage tourism only at a
moderate level in spite of increasing willingness of participation in Lijiang Old Town;
[2] the participation of community residents delineates significant relationship with
demography of resident, participation approach, participation degree, and
participation condition, respectively; [3] the barriers of participation can converged
into four independent factors and be used as independent variables to assess the
participation for the specific participations in the process of cultural heritage tourism;
[4] a series of assessment models of participation are eventually established to
evaluate the specific participations and the whole participation of community
residents in the process of cultural heritage tourism. In such essence, these findings
can provide valuable implications and contributions to facilitate community
participation and realise the sustainability of cultural heritage tourism in Lijiang Old
Town. In addition, this research can also offer useful references on community
participation and tourism development especially for those cultural heritage
destinations.
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Keywords
Community Participation In Cultural Heritage Tourism , In Lijiang Old Town, China