Development of an Instrument for Identifying Community Reasons for Staging a Festival

Focus group interviews and a literature review were used to identify an initial comprehensive set of 60 items describing why nonprofit and government entities stage festivals. After pretesting and subsequently testing the items on a sample of 291 festival organizers, a 30-item instrument consisting of eight domains was demonstrated to be reliable and valid. The eight generic reasons for staging festivals were recreation/socialization, culture/ education, tourism, internal revenue generation, natural resources, agriculture, external revenue generation, and community pride/spirit.