Development, Calibration and Validation of a Scale to Measure Tourist Destination Mobilities: Local Residents’ Perspective from Sri Lanka

Abstract

Macro level movement of populations, material and physical objects, technological relocations, information, communication, ideas and image transfers, temporal transformations of dwellers through daily movements all count as common forms of mobility triggers at tourist destinations. Recently, the discourse has attracted tourism and other social researchers’ attention mostly at the theoretical level showing significant absence of empirical studies. Mobility discourse, regardless of its vital significance in day-to-day life, has generally been under examined within the scientific community. A significant obstruction for this is the nonexistence of a scale to measure Tourist Destination Mobilities (TDM). Thus, the central focus of this paper is to develop, calibrate and validate a scale to measure TDM from the residents’ perspective. The item generation was conducted in several stages to make sure the subjects are identified and measured vigorously. Accordingly, a comprehensive literature review on mobilities and tourism development was undertaken. Parallel to the literature survey a series of in-depth interviews were conducted with tourism industry stakeholders to dig deeper the discourse of TDM. Based on the findings of the literature survey as well as of in-depth interviews the initial items were proposed and were reviewed by four tourism professors and three tourism industry professionals for further refinement. The initial scale was comprised of 42 items and it was field tested with a sample of 67 residents in Dambulla and Sigiriya UNESCO world heritage tourism zones in December 2015. Scale refinement and purification was accomplished by sampling 302 residents in the same tourism zones in January and February 2016 that generated 32 items with 6 dimensions. Final validation was completed a survey sample of 791 in March, June and July 2016 at the same tourism zone. Factor analysis succeeded 26 items with 5 dimensions explaining a total of 84 percent variance of TDM. Dimensions of the final scale are; Multiplicity of destination governance (6 items), Varying image and identity (6 items), Migration and changing communal values (5 items), Transport & telecommunication infrastructure (5 items) and Restructuring of economic space (4 items). Findings reflected concurrent tourism and mobilities literature emphasizing governance and capital as key mobility stimuli. TDM scale requisites further validation in different contexts to establish generalizability.