Concurrent Validity of the Sustainable Tourism Attitude Scale

RESEARCH NOTES AND REPORTS

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Tribe, J. 1997 The Indiscipline of Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 24:638–657. Submitted 27 December 2005. Resubmitted 11 July 2006. Resubmitted 8 September 2006. Resubmitted 17 October 2006. Resubmitted 29 December 2006. Accepted 20 February 2007

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2007.03.013 Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 1081–1084, 2007 0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain

Concurrent Validity of the Sustainable Tourism Attitude Scale E. Sirakaya-Turk University of South Carolina Columbia, USA Over the past two decades, the academic community has put much emphasis on determining the antecedents of residents’ support for tourism, attitudes towards its development, and, more recently, attitudes toward its sustainability. Since residents are considered an integral part of destination management, understanding their attitudes toward sustainable tourism is an important step in gaining public support. One of the pioneering studies conducted by Choi and Sirakaya (2005) developed the seven-factor Sustainable Tourism Attitudes Scale (SUSTAS) which is now to be validated using various data sets for its construct and predictive validities. The original 2005 scale contains seven factors: factor 1, perceived social cost of tourism, interpreted as residents’ perceptions of adverse social and cultural changes of tourism activity; factor 2, environmental sustainability, centers around the protection of environmental resources for present and future generations; factor 3, long-term planning, delineates planning as a participatory and dynamic strategy to be used over time for achieving sustainability; factor 4, perceived economic benefits, developed to capture attitudes toward economic benefits and costs associated with tourism development; factor 5, community-centered economy, contains statements that capture residents’ attitudes toward the use of local financial and human resources with the purpose of achieving economic autarky which in return might help empower community residents; factor 6, ensuring tourist satisfaction, captures the attitudes toward measurement and management of touristic satisfaction since it is crucial for the long-term economic viability, development, and success of tourism; and factor 7, maximizing community participation, captures the importance of residents’ and stakeholder participation in planning and decisions. SUSTAS appears to capture the fundamental tenets suggested by the extant literature. Its internal consistency in the original 2005 study was verified via reliability analyses (Cronbach’s alpha was in the 0.78–0.95 range). Although the authors addressed some validity issues like content- and discriminant-validity with their scale, the attempt was limited to a sample of residents in a small town in the United States. Moreover, superior forms of validity (such as external- or predictive- or concurrent-validity) were not established. This note is concerned with establishing a more stringent form of validity, namely, predictive validity or concurrent validity. Validity is one of the essential

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tests for scale development. A commonly accepted definition of validity is the degree to which a scale measures what it intends to measure. Predictive validity is the ability of a measuring instrument to estimate some criterion that is external to the measuring instrument itself (for example, satisfaction with the level of sustainable tourism development). Concurrent validity is established when a scale is able to ‘‘distinguish between two groups that it theoretically should be able to distinguish between’’ (Pelstring 2006). The author theorized that Business Enterprises for Sustainable Travel Education Network (Best-En) members would care more about sustainability—and thus score higher on the SUSTAS—than the members of the general public. This is a voluntary organization of educators/researchers whose members advocate teaching and practice of sustainability actions and have contributed to sustainable tourism think-tank meetings (Sirakaya-Turk 2006). Such an approach has been used in the past by Dunlap and Van Liere (1978) and others who validated the New Environmental Paradigm scale. The purpose of this research note, a case study, is to provide further support for the validity of the scale. The SUSTAS instrument was first translated into Turkish and then back to English to identify problem areas. All collected data are representative of their associated populations. The Turkish Cypriot data were collected via telephone interviews with a random sample of 955 adults 18 years of age or older. Data from Izmir, Turkey, were collected via a clustering sampling technique proportional to populations of city-districts using face-to-face interviews with a sample of 1,817 residents. Data from 45 Best-En think-tank participants were collected via an online survey containing SUSTAS items. Thus, the two communities represent the feelings of the general public, and Best-En participants represent a special interest group that is theoretically thought to score better than the former group on SUSTAS and that the latter would better differentiate between Best-En members and the members of the general public. The factors used herein were normalized in two general samples of the survey (Turkish and Cypriot sample); hence factor scores were used in the comparison of results with the Best-En group. Also, for ease of interpretation, and because there were not enough cases to conduct factor analysis for the group members only simple additive scores are reported in Table 1 for means comparison. This can be viewed as a limitation of the present study. According to means difference tests (Table 1), the Best-En group members scored statistically higher (mean = 135) than either of the two general population samples in specific SUSTAS factors. The superscripts attached to mean values of individual SUSTAS factors in column 4 indicate the statistically significant differences between individual samples. For example, for factor 3, longterm-planning, Best-En group (superscripted c) scored significantly higher (mean = 18.8) than the samples from Izmir (superscripted a; mean = 16.85), and Cyprus (superscripted b; mean = 17.09). For factor 1, perceived-social-costs, Best-En members scored higher than the Cyprus sample. But two factor scores of the group were not significantly different from the general population, indicating problems in differentiating the group from the general population. However, as hypothesized, five of the seven factors were significantly different from the two samples. It seems that there is still work ahead in terms of establishing predictive validity of SUSTAS, which needs further examination as the differences reported here may come from the data collection methods (general survey of the public via telephone in Cyprus versus online survey technique used in the Best-En case); since these differences in survey techniques were not controlled for, the results need to be evaluated cautiously. When using SUSTAS, it is recommended that its scale items be modified to include community specific concerns. Future studies should also include communityspecific sustainability groups. At the time of this research, the existence of such sustainability groups within each of the communities reported was not apparent. The

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Table 1. Means Comparison of SUSTAS Factors SUSTAS Factors Perceived Social Cost of Tourism

Community Izmir, Turkey a Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En c

b

N

Mean

Std. Deviation

F

Sig.

1736 933 37

9.48 9.22c 10.60b

3.60 4.14 2.87

3.37

.037

.042

Environmental Sustainability

Izmir, Turkey Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1776 21.97c 948 21.87c 38 23.05ab

3.17 2.38 2.03

3.16

Long-Term Planning

Izmir Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1783 16.85c 936 17.09c 35 18.80ab

2.90 2.19 1.39

10.93 .001

Perceived Economic Benefits of Tourism

Izmir Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1755 16.77c 941 17.29c 38 15.29ab

2.57 2.51 2.09

20.92 .001

CommunityCentered Economyd

Izmir Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1745 939 37

20.27 20.75 20.38

3.17 2.91 2.22

7.42

NS

Ensuring Visitor Satisfactiond

Izmir Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1760 944 38

20.68 21.05 20.53

3.13 2.62 2.37

5.16

NS

Maximizing Community Participation

Izmir Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1712 23.19c 939 24.40c 38 26.03ab

3.59 3.26 3.78

44.73 .001

Overall SUSTASe

Izmir Cyprus (Turkish Republic) Best-En

1535 129.54c 880 131.85 33 134.94a

14.04 11.87 10.25

10.42 .001

Note: Double letters signify alpha level at the .10 or less; Single letters signify alpha level at the .5 or less NS: not significant for differences between Best-En and two general samples aIzmir sample, bCyprus sample, cBest-En group, for example, for the first factor Perceived Social Costs, 9.22c means Cyprus differs significantly from cBest-En, similarly, Best-En’s mean of 18.8ab differs significantly from aIzmir and bCyprus. dCaution: the two samples of general public might be significantly different from each other. e Represents summated score of the entire scale.

validation process should continue for individual factors rather than the scale as a whole, since, for example, environmental groups are easier to find in communities than groups dealing specifically with sustainability issues. However, even when viewing the findings of this study from this angle, one might argue that SUSTAS has done relatively better in five of seven factors in predicting higher scores in at least one community and hence offers strong support as to its predictive validity. Studies that establish other forms of validity are needed to supplement the findings of reported here. For example, the concurrent validity can be established by regressing the five SUSTAS factors on some behavioral or theoretically related variables such as overall satisfaction with sustainable tourism or overall evaluation of sustainable development. If the results are comparable between the two samples (Turkish Cyprus vs. Turkey) this would establish concurrent validity of the scale as well as supported by both reviewers of this research note.

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Acknowledgements—The author is grateful to Turgut Var for his help in gathering data and the Izmir University of Economics for funding of the project.

E. Sirakaya-Turk: School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management, The University of South Carolina, Columbia SC 29208, USA. Email

REFERENCES Choi, H., and E. Sirakaya 2005 Measuring Residents’ Attitude toward Sustainable Tourism: Development of Sustainable Tourism Attitude Scale. Journal of Travel Research 43:380–394. Dunlap, R., and K. Van Liere 1978 The New Environmental Paradigm: A Proposed Measuring Instrument and Preliminary Results. Journal of Environmental Education 9:10–19. Sirakaya-Turk, E. 2006 Sustainable Tourism and the Role of Educators within this Emerging Paradigm: The Case of Best-En. E-Review of Tourism Research. eRTR 4 (2):6–8. Pelstring, L. 2006 The NEP and Measurement Validity (17 November).

Submitted 11 November 2006. Resubmitted 13 March 2007. Accepted 20 May

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2007.05.014