The Embrace-Withdraw Continuum Scale: Operationalizing Residents’ Responses toward Tourism Development

Abstract

For more than three decades, tourism scholars have devoted attention to describing, explaining, and potentially predicting how host residents respond to tourism development in their community. A recent qualitative study by Ap and Crompton proposed that residents employ four strategies with regard to tourism activity in their community. These responses to tourism fall along a continuum of strategies ranging from embracing tourism to physical or psychological withdrawal from the community. However, the literature has not provided researchers with an operational measure of the embrace-withdraw continuum. This study reports on the development and measurement of an embrace-withdraw scale using data from a probability sample of residents of Bozeman, Montana. The scale demonstrated both reliability and validity. Several recommendations for future research are provided for implementing the embrace-withdraw continuum scale when conducting host-resident studies.

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