Development of a standard measurement scale to measure community attitude towards impacts of tourism in Malaysia

• Main Authors: Mohd Shariff, Nurhazani, Mohd Nor, Nor Asyikin, Rashid Radha, Jasmine Zea Raziah, Che Ismail, Hasni @ Hasnah
• Other Authors: Singh, Manhas Perikshat
• Format: Book Section
• Language: English
• Published: PHI Learning 2012
• Subjects: G Geography (General)
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/8275/1/Nurz.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/8275/
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

Community plays an important role in determining the success of tourism development.Even though there have been many studies to understand community attitude towards tourism impacts, only a few studies are conducted to develop a standard measurement attitudinal scale which is valid and reliable generally to the country and specifically to the community.The paper presents a study conducted in Malaysia with the intention to develop a standard measurement scale to measure the community attitude towards tourism impacts named as MACTIAS. The scale has followed a procedure suggested by Churchill (1979) and DcVellis (1991) in developing a standard scale.The procedures of developing MACTIAS involved five stages.The first stage in generating the item pool ended with 68 tourism impact items derived from literature and interview session.The second stage involved testing for content validity of the scale.It was measured by a panel of experts in tourism consisting of 10 judges.The results ended with 50 tourism impact items.The third stage completed with scale purification using a pre-test sample.The results indicated seven factors derived but only three factors were confirmed.The next stage involved scale verification using Malaysian community as the main respondents.The results of factor analysis indicated eight factors derived but only seven factors were confirmed.Thus, the items to be further tested were only 49.Finally, the results of the reliability test indicated 13 items had low coefficient alpha value and were eliminated from the scale.The process, therefore, ended with only 36 items to be retained in the scale. The study confirms MACTIAS as a valid and reliable scale which can be used to measure the community attitudes in other tourism destinations.