A Comment Concerning “Developing and Testing a Tourism Impact Scale”

In a recent article, Ap and Crompton (1998) reported on the development of a 35-item tourism impact scale. In recent years, the discussion of the need for such measurement systems with regard to tourism impacts has been reported in the literature. Correspondingly, a number of studies have examined tourism impacts using various approaches. This is obviously an important topic as evidenced by the number of articles published in this and other journals. However, the idea of developing a standardized scale to measure impacts of tourism evokes strong reactions, both positive and negative, from many researchers (Lankford and Howard 1994). Ap and Crompton reported the development of a scale derived from the literature and from interviews, which was later refined using scale development procedures. Their scale was pretested using a convenience sample of university students. Subsequently, the authors report that this scale is superior to other scales and approaches to studying this topic primarily because other scales do not appear to be consistent with any of the “taxonomic” frameworks that appear in the literature. What is important to note is that the literature varies widely on the impacts of scale development. A taxonomic framework would be extremely difficult to identify due to the variation in communities, levels of development, ethnic makeup, sociodemographics of resident and tourist populations, land use, and competing industries in any given instance or place. This challenge does not speak at all to methodology, which is what most academics decide to take issue over in terms of scale development and testing. Preglau (1994) is concerned that researchers do not examine all the literature relative to the variety of tourism impacts. Unfortunately, the review of previous studies oftentimes is misrepresented or misquoted for a variety of reasons. This is one of the primary issues that I must draw attention to with regard to Ap and Crompton’s article. First, Ap and Crompton noted that the two domains found by Lankford and Howard (1994) are not consistent with the literature. Interestingly, a number of other researchers (Allen et al. 1988; Perdue, Long, and Allen 1987, 1990; Belisle and Hoy 1980) have reported similar findings. Rollins (1997); Schneider, Lankford and Oguchi (1997); and Kang, Long, and Perdue (1996) have found support for the Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS) (Lankford and Howard 1994; Lankford 1994) and its domains. Madrigal (1993) also found similarities to the TIAS within his study. Second, Ap and Crompton stated that the questions Lankford and Howard (1994) used in their study were derived from Perdue, Long, and Allen’s (1990) study. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the research and the subsequent TIAS developed and reported by Lankford and Howard (1994). In this very Journal of Travel Research, Lankford (1994) reported on page 38 (Vol. 4, No. 3) a figure that represents the scale development process used to develop a tourism impact attitude scale. In addition, on pages 127-30 of the Annals of Tourism Research (Lankford and Howard 1994, Vol. 21, No. 1), the full scale construction, generation of items, and pretesting procedures were reported. The following summarizes the discussion of scale development and item generation for both of these articles: