Bringing Emotions into Social Exchange Theory: Exploring the Role of Resident-Tourist Interaction.

Resident-tourism relationships play an important role in sustainability of the tourism industry and destination communities. This dissertation seeks to enhance understanding of the resident-tourism relationship through a revised version of the Social Exchange Theory (SET). While there is research on the connection between residents' perceptions of tourism impacts and their support for tourism, the role that residents' interaction with tourists play in formulating this relationship remains understudied. Additionally, the outcome of SET has been to measure residents' support for tourism or lack thereof. This approach only measures the contributions of residents to the industry and fails to discuss the implications that these perceptions have on residents' community attachment. Lastly, the major events of 2020 (COVID-19, social justice movements, and wildfires) have affected Oregon's tourism industry in many ways. There is a crucial need for understanding resident-tourism relationship as the tourism industry recovers amidst low community trust and opportunities to welcome tourist back to Portland and the state of Oregon.To address the existing gaps, I developed a conceptual model by integrating the SET, Emotional Solidarity (ES), and community attachment concept. Using Structural Equation Modeling and data from a 2018 survey of residents of Portland, Oregon, I empirically tested the proposed measurement and structural model. Furthermore, I examined the mediating effect of residents' ES between the resident's perceptions of tourism impacts and their support for tourism and community attachment.Results indicate that residents' support for tourism is predicted by their perceptions of positive environmental, positive economic, and negative sociocultural impacts of tourism. These relationships are mediated by ES factors (welcoming nature and sympathetic understanding) and moderated by frequency of encounter with tourists. Results also revealed that residents' willingness (welcoming nature) to accept tourists is the strongest factor in predicting residents' support for tourism development and residents' community attachment. The effect of residents' perceptions of negative sociocultural and negative environmental impacts of tourism on their welcoming nature is moderated by frequency of encounter with tourists. Finally, while the results extend support for integrating ES scale into SET, the findings show that Portlanders' community attachment is not adequately explained by the proposed model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)