The concept of community attachment, while seemingly an important issue in the assessment of the social impacts
of tourism, has not received much attention in the tourism
research literature. However, many sociologists, operating in
other contexts, have attempted to define and measure attachment
to community with varying levels of success. Community
attachment is really one aspect of a larger question - the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the
social structure and function of communities. Community
attachment can be conceptually defined as the extent and pat- tern of social participation and integration into the community,
and sentiment or affect toward the community. Kasarda
and Janowitz (1974) viewed the community as a social
construction with its own life cycle, possessing ecological,
institutional, and normative dimensions. Community may be
seen as a complex web of social bonds, but &dquo;fashioned by
the large scale institution of mass society&dquo; (Kasarda and
Janowitz 1974).
Researchers have measured community attachment in
several ways. Past research has used length of residency as
a measure of community attachment and found that the two
are highly correlated (Goudy 1982; Kasarda and Janowitz
1974; Sampson 1988). Several studies attempted to develop an association between attitudes toward tourism and length
of residency or place of birth (Davis, Allen, and Cosenza
1988; Liu and Var 1986; Pizam 1978; Sheldon and Var 1984;
Um and Crompton 1987). These reports show an association,
but length of residency and place of birth are not necessarily
appropriate measures of attachment to a specific community.
For example, people moving to a rural community may have
searched for specific positive attributes (such as friendliness
or lack of crime) and therefore quickly established interpersonal
networks and become highly attached to the community.
No tourism-related studies have examined associations
between other measures of community attachment found in
the sociology literature (such as how people would feel about
moving away) and attitudes.
In this study, community attachment is measured two
ways: (1) the length of residence in the local community, and
(2) how study participants responded to two Likert scale items
used in several previous studies of community attachment:
&dquo;If I had to move away from my community, I would be
very sorry to leave,&dquo; and &dquo;I’d rather live in the town where
I live now than anywhere else.&dquo; Participants could select
any one of five positions on the scale from strongly agree
to strongly disagree.