Residents’ Perceptions toward Tourism Development: A Case Study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the opportunity to review the manuscript ‘Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA’ .

This article compares the factors influencing residents' perceptions and local support toward tourism in gateway communities of the Grand Canyon National Park. It seeks to identify drivers of local support in respect to national park tourism development.

Structural equation modelling is employed and community participation, living environment, trust of tourism institutions, tourism benefits, and community satisfaction are found to be the determinants of support for tourism development, while the cost of tourism was not.

The authors discuss context and prior work in this area appropriately.

The statistical method employed is structural equation modelling, based on data obtained via a survey. The data collection procedure appeared surprisingly elaborate though falls short on revealing some crucial details.

Some questions regarding the survey and it’s use in the subsequent SEM:

In order to assure representativeness, what efforts were made to obtain a representative sample?

Using a systematic sample may not have been appropriate as it was probably only applied in a small area which may not be representative of gateway communities in their entirety?

Would a 2 stage cluster design not have been more appropriate as a sampling strategy (where both stages might well be employing a systematic sample)?

Were tests conducted to insure that the (self?) selected sample was representative of the gateway communities? 

Presumably there was a significant amount of non-response? Was this presumtive bias addressed via a weighting scheme, propensity scoring or some other technique?

It might be worthwhile to address these points with a few sentences in the article.

The structural equation model appears to have good fit.

Overall a nice and competent paper that makes a good contribution to scholarship in this field.

 

Author Response

Thank you for reviewing the manuscript ‘Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA

In order to assure representativeness, what efforts were made to obtain a representative sample?

Answer: Thank you for this comment. Grand Canyon National Park is one of the oldest national parks with 6.2 million visitors in 2019, a wonderful year-round vacation destination, and the towns around the park are strongly bonded by the tourism business. The park and communities are both excellent representations in North America. Of course, the results of this research were only applicable to this region. The sampling method was used in many similar studies (e.g., Chiu et al., 2014; Jackson, 2008; Tosun, 2002), and we did try our best to do a door-to-door survey. The systematic sampling method with a sampling interval equal to 12 was used to select the resident households by the door numbers, where the first household was selected by a draw. And we collected as many questionnaires as possible within a limited time, and the questionnaires were distributed to a total of 620 residents. The minimum sample size was calculated to be 366 with a 5% error and 95% confidence interval.

 

Chiu, Yen-Ting Helena, Wan-I Lee & Tsung-Hsiung Chen (2014) Environmentally Responsible Behavior in Ecotourism: Exploring the Role of Destination Image and Value Perception, Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 19:8, 876-889, DOI: 10.1080/10941665.2013.818048

Jackson, L. A. (2008). Residents’ perceptions of the impacts of special event tourism. Journal of Place Management and Development, 1(3), 240–255. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538330810911244

Tosun, C. (2002). Host perceptions of impacts: A comparative tourism study. Annals of Tourism Research, 29(1), 231–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(01)00039-1

 

Using a systematic sample may not have been appropriate as it was probably only applied in a small area which may not be representative of gateway communities in their entirety?

 

Answer: The surrounding communities were not too large to survey. I considered them small areas. Systematic sampling with a sampling interval equal to selecting the household in the communities could help quickly identify the residents and avoid the bias that the respondents were from the same household. The interval was selected according to the entire households in the community, therefore, the sampling of this study was representative of the selected communities in their entirety.

Would a 2-stage cluster design not have been more appropriate as a sampling strategy (where both stages might well be employing a systematic sample)?

Answer: This is a good question and suggestion; I will consider using it in future research. The gateway communities around the Grand Canyon National Park are quite different in social, economic and environmental situations. However, the residents inside of each town (village) are quite similar. Therefore, we believe the systematic sample is much better and more straightforward than a 2-stage cluster sampling in this study.

Were tests conducted to insure that the (self?) selected sample was representative of the gateway communities? 

Answer: We didn’t do tests to ensure the representativeness as we had conducted a related literature review and pre-visit of the communities before the sampling survey.

Presumably there was a significant amount of non-response? Was this presumptive bias addressed via a weighting scheme, propensity scoring or some other technique?

Answer: Thanks for these questions. There’re two main effects of non-response answers: 1). non-response answers will reduce the effective sample size, thus increasing the sampling error and failing to meet the requirements of survey accuracy in the original sampling design. The sample size is closely related to sampling error, which has been clearly demonstrated in the theory of sampling inference. It can be concluded that sampling error is related to sample size, and the decrease in sample size will inevitably lead to an increase in sampling error. 2). non-response answer will result in an estimation bias that will not decrease with the sample size increase. For example, our team found unanswered questions when issuing and retrieving the questionnaires. We issued 620 questionnaires and retrieved 620, and the validity questionnaire was 559. It can be seen that our questionnaire produced non-response answers. Suppose we conduct data analysis and collation based on our survey data. In that case, the conclusions we draw will undoubtedly be inaccurate, and there will be many deviations. On the one hand, the error caused by non-response questions is not only related to the response group and the non-response group value; on the other hand, it is also related to the non-response rate. The deviation cannot be ignored if different respondents are concentrated in a particular class, even if the non-response rate is very low. Most of the respondents expressed requirements for the participants. We can extract information from this data and conclude with precision. Although we did much work to prevent non-response questions, they are unavoidable. We paid attention to the design of the questionnaire, investigated the distributor training, and selected a suitable distribution time to avoid lunch time. Furthermore, the data analysis of the results containing non-response considered the deviation factors when determining the confidence interval of the overall average or when estimating the range of error.

It might be worthwhile to address these points with a few sentences in the article.

Answer: Thanks for the suggestion; these points have been concluded in the manuscript.

The structural equation model appears to have good fit. Overall, a nice and competent paper that makes a good contribution to scholarship in this field.

Answer: Thanks for your comments, and your suggestions are very helpful.

Reviewer 2 Report

I have reviewed the manuscript "Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA", the study is very interesting, has a good design and structure. The authors clearly define their objective, hypothesis and methodology. Prior to further processing I request the authors to comply with the following comments, this will serve to improve their manuscript:

1. Please review the citation style in the text, consult the editorial guidelines of the journal.

2. The map of the study area should be redesigned, the idea of a figure on the study area is that the reader is immediately positioned in the study site globally. I leave you examples that the authors could take as examples, one using gis software and another one simply with an image editor. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/11/6854/htm. I hope these examples will help you to improve. That is, you would be missing one more image to understand the global location.

3. The authors should clearly describe the limitations of their study and possible new research that could arise from their results.

4. In the discussions I recommend that you consider the negations and discuss why?

5. In the conclusions they should be more specific about the accepted and denied hypotheses.

6. I recommend to the authors to discuss a little more about the increase of visitors that will exist after the pandemic, I leave these documents that could be useful for the discussion and I recommend to consider them.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/8/884

Author Response

To reviewer 2:

Thanks for reviewing the manuscript ‘Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA’.

1. Please review the citation style in the text, and consult the editorial guidelines of the journal.

Thanks for the comments, and the in-text citation has been revised to the required style.

2. The map of the study area should be redesigned, the idea of a figure on the study area is that the reader is immediately positioned in the study site globally. I leave you examples that the authors could take as examples, one using gis software and another one simply with an image editor. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/11/6854/htm. I hope these examples will help you to improve. That is, you would be missing one more image to understand the global location.

Thanks for this suggestion. We didn’t think it was necessary to point out the global location of the national park. The regional location of the park, the communities' distribution, and their positions to the park boundary are generally what readers want to know.

3. The authors should clearly describe the limitations of their study and possible new research that could arise from their results.

Thanks for this suggestion; the description has been added in the article.

4. In the discussions I recommend that you consider the negations and discuss why?

Thanks for the recommendation. The negations were part of the findings, and the reasons for each negation were analyzed and discussed with a comparison with previous studies.

5. In the conclusions they should be more specific about the accepted and denied hypotheses.

Thanks for the comments, and the conclusions have been revised. The authors discussed and analyzed why the hypotheses were accepted or denied and compared the results with previous studies with similar and opposite results.

6. I recommend to the authors to discuss a little more about the increase of visitors that will exist after the pandemic, I leave these documents that could be useful for the discussion and I recommend to consider them.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/8/884

Thanks for the comments, and this is a good suggestion. We didn’t discuss the trends in visits to the national park because we have done a detailed analysis of this in a separate paper. As the fieldwork for the study reported here was completed in 2019, before the pandemic, we did not consider it relevant to this particular study, which is why we have treated it in a separate paper.

Hu, F.; Wang, Z.; Sheng, G.; Lia, X.; Chen, C.; Geng, D.; Hong, X.; Xu, N.; Zhu, Z.; Zhang, Z.; et al. Impacts of national park tourism sites: a perceptual analysis from residents of three spatial levels of local communities in Banff national park. Environ. Dev. Sustain. 2021, doi:10.1007/s10668-021-01562-2.

Reviewer 3 Report

 

I read with interest the article "Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA," and I think the information presented is very interesting and useful for understanding some of the dynamics of the relationship between residents and the Grand Canyon National Park geared toward tourism development. The authors used Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze the data collected.

The article is well written and well explained, and the results highlight a gap between community residents' desires for national park development and the current state of development.

Some considerations follow:

"Introduction" is clear and provides the information needed to understand the objectives of the study, but the literature review could be improved with more bibliography to support the discussion section.

"Materials and Methods" and "Results" are clear, well explained, and provide information that makes it easy to understand what was done and accomplished. In any case, a questionnaire outline is due in order to provide all the necessary information for a complete view of the method.

In addition, I believe that the "discussion" should be strengthened and supplemented with new comments to explain more thoroughly the meaning of the results.

The "Conclusions" and "Research Limitations and Future Work" sections highlight the main aspects that emerge from the study.

Overall, I appreciate the topic of your paper and consider your study interesting and quite original.

Therefore, in my humble opinion, I believe the article can be published in the IF journal as Sustainability, after a small review and only when the editors and other reviewers provide a positive assessment.

Author Response

Thank you for the comments and encouragement. We have done our best to revise the article according to your suggestions and comments, and hope you are satisfied with this revision.

Reviewer 4 Report

The article is up-to-date and interesting. The text meets all the requirements of a scientific study in terms of theoretical, methodological and empirical issues. However, there are no specific postulative and design threads.

Detailed comments:

1. table 1 (page 4) and table 10 (page 13) have limited communication skills.

2. similarly, the use of abbreviations in the text, although explained earlier, limits the perception of the content.

3. the Conclusion was presented too broadly, without referring to concrete results.

4. the Discussion is missing.

Author Response

The article is up-to-date and interesting. The text meets all the requirements of a scientific study in terms of theoretical, methodological and empirical issues. However, there are no specific postulative and design threads.

Thank you for the comments. As you know, there are many research theories and designs to discuss for a multidimensional approach to studying this complex system in constant change. In order to help understand the factors influencing perceptions of the development and sustainability of tourism, as many of the qualities, conditions and players that make up the system should be assessed as possible. Without stakeholder understanding and support, sustainable development of tourism in a destination is impossible. Different stakeholder groups may all seek out very different qualities and conditions in making that community a desirable place to live. This study was designed to explore the gateway community residents’ perceptions of the tourism development of national parks, and identify the perceived impacts, most concerning issues, and influential factors of local support. The theoretical framework used is based on the research gaps we discovered from existing literature and field studies. This study was also based on a questionnaire instrument, that was designed according to the three aspects mentioned above. The process of research questions and data analyses (e.g., Importance-Performance Analysis and Structural Equation Model) of different parts of the questionnaire to answer the research questions were described in the text.

Detailed comments:

1. table 1 (page 4) and table 10 (page 13) have limited communication skills.

Thank you for the comments. We added notes of abbreviations under the tables that have abbreviations. Hope this will help readers to understand the variables and tables clearly.

2. Similarly, the use of abbreviations in the text, although explained earlier, limits the perception of the content.

Thank you for your comments, the original purpose of using abbreviations was to make the text more concise and easy to read, but your comments made us find that the readers might have difficulties remembering each variable. Therefore, we revised the in-text abbreviations to phrases in the discussion part to make it more readable, and still use abbreviations in the methods part to keep the conciseness of the method illustration.

3. The Conclusion was presented too broadly, without referring to concrete results.

Thank you for the comments. The objective of this study was to investigate the perspective of residents living within a gateway area in an effort to contribute toward more general solutions, strategies, and guidance for the planning and management process.

For more specific results, this study identified a gap between the desires of community residents for the development of national parks and community tourism and the current state of development, suggesting that these communities need to take management measures to improve the performance of the factors. The most positive impacts of national park tourism are economical, but the environmental factors ranked first in the future management priority. And the variables that influenced local support for tourism around the national park were identified as community participation (CP), the living environment (LE), trust in tourism agencies (TT), tourism benefits (TB), community satisfaction (CS) and the relationship was discussed for future sustainable management.

The conclusion pointed out the findings of the Importance-Performance Analysis and Structural Equation Model findings and focused on providing general solutions based on the discussion above. Therefore, we have revised the discussion and conclusion parts to reflect the finding and their implications.

4. the Discussion is missing.

Thank you for your comments. We have revised the paragraphs of the discussion part. We have specifically discussed the contribution of IPA/SEM results to prioritizing tourism management for the need for local support for tourism, as well as the reason why some hypotheses failed, and the differences from the previous research literature.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This is looking good now.

Author Response

The previous map, I believe, has clearly illustrated the study site. Thank you again for your suggestions; we have redone the map and hope you find this map well with this article. Your suggestion also helps us to improve the quality of the article significantly. We have improved the discussion and conclusion sections, and hope you are satisfied with this revision.

Reviewer 2 Report

After reviewing the second version of the manuscript "Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA" we regret that the authors have not been receptive to the comments and changes requested.

Therefore, as it stands, the manuscript cannot be published. 

The map of the study area does not have the quality of a research map. 

We are in a post-pandemic situation and we know the fate of mass tourism and the possible repercussions of being a protected area. Especially how it will influence the perception and development of tourism.

The authors should have focused on the observations and recommendations made, which were very easy to correct, but they did not do so.

Author Response

The previous map, I believe, has clearly illustrated the study site. Thank you again for your suggestions, we have redone the map and hope you find this map well with this article. Your suggestion also help us to improve the quality of the article significantly. We have improved the discussion and conclusion sections, and hope you are satisfied with this revision.

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for your reply to the review. I state that, apart from the editorial changes, the Authors remained with the current version of the text, without actually introducing any changes.

Author Response

Thank you for the valuable comments and suggestions. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, I have revised manuscript "Residents' perceptions toward tourism development: a case study from Grand Canyon National Park, USA" for the second time. Thank you for the work done, all comments have been considered. This is a better version of the manuscript.

Author Response

Thank you for the valuable suggestions. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the reply to the review. I do not comment on the text of the article.