Using residents' perceptions research to inform planning and management for sustainable tourism: A study of the Gold Coast Schoolies Week, a contentious tourism event

Abstract

The potential for resident attitude surveys to reduce the negative community impacts of tourism is constrained by their emphasis on closed-ended cognitive statements requiring simplistic numeric responses. This paper explores ways to obtain and analyze open-ended survey outputs from 791 residents in order to develop effective prescriptive recommendations for reducing the negative impacts, and increasing positive impacts from Australia's Gold Coast Schoolies Week (GCSW), a contentious event associated with widespread, high-risk antisocial behavior. Thematic content analysis revealed super-themes of unambivalent “opposition” to GCSW (22.0%) and “support” (7.3%), but also three super-themes that are conditional. “Mitigative prevention” (49.8%) includes supervision, alcohol/predator restrictions, spatial/temporal containment and dispersal themes, while “mitigative enhancement” (14.1%) includes constructive diversion, education and balanced media coverage themes. “Mitigative justice” (7.3%) is dominated by rule enforcement. The outcomes indicate support for social exchange theory in the expression of strategies through which those exchanges occur. The mitigative super-themes inform a research-based template for sustainably managing both GCSW and other contentious tourism-related events elsewhere. Using Tosun's three-stage citizen's participation hierarchy, support was indicated for the “induced participation” middle ground of consultation, with little support for top-down “coercive participation”, or for the citizen control of “spontaneous participation”.