Measuring the social impacts of local authority events: a pilot study for a civic pride scale

The provision of events and festivals by local government has become an expected, if non-mandatory, service. In many regions these events are organised in order to provide mainly social, rather than economic, benefits to the community and, as a consequence, the providing organisation may have difficulty in demonstrating a return on the budget invested. This paper suggests the use of multi-item attitude scales to quantify the intangible effects of the festival or event programme on the local community. The findings of a pilot study of one such scale are presented showing that reliable and valid methods can be developed, that they can be relatively low cost and simple to apply and that the data generated can be of great value in enhancing the evaluation of local authority service provision.