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Community involvement in tourism development is a subject that has attracted the attention of tourism researchers largely due to the potentially unfair power distribution between residents and powerful interest groups. This attention, however, has not produced significant literature regarding the possibly varied levels of involvement in tourism planning and development preferred by different residents. The present study addresses that lack of information by exploring the range of residents' preferred involvement approaches based on their demographic and perceptual profiles. Study findings should help all residents with different involvement needs being fairly represented in community engagement. Extending Tosun's typology of community involvement with new content about involvement scope, this study identifies four types of involvement preferences: (1) involving all residents in decision-making; (2) involving some residents in decision-making; (3) excluding residents from decision-making; and (4) excluding residents from any tourism planning effort. Respondents' perceptual profiles, including perceived social costs, perceived environmental sustainability or costs of tourism, and self-evaluative tourism knowledge influences their preferences for involvement in tourism development, as do their demographic profiles, including tourism industry employment status and household income. The limited variance explained in the preference measures, however, suggests the need to explore additional individual profiles.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.