Methodological and theoretical advancements in social impacts of tourism research

This lead article introduces the double special issue dedicated to methodological and theoretical advancements in social impacts of tourism research. We begin by providing an overview of five key developmental stages of research within this area: Definitions, typologies, and conceptual model development; the advent of case study-based, atheoretical empirical inquiry; scale design, development, and testing; further scale development/refinement and theoretical application; and theoretical model development and testing. Brief evolutionary histories of the methodological and theoretical advancements of research dedicated to social impacts of tourism are then discussed. This includes a review of the most pertinent predictor variables (along with a visual display of each and key studies) in explaining residents’ perceptions of social impacts of tourism and a thorough review of most frequently used theoretical frameworks. Following this, brief synopses of the articles are provided along with key themes (e.g. resident-tourist relationships, social impacts and residents’ attitudes, residents’ empowerment, overtourism, and methodologies) and salient points of each work. In closing, we suggest numerous lines of inquiry that will continue to advance research into social impacts of tourism. Though these studies were undertaken prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, we emphasize that future work should be designed with the pandemic in mind.