Jago, Leo Kenneth, Deery, Margaret and Fredline, Liz (2005) Testing of a Compressed Generic Instrument to Assess Host Community Perceptions of Events: a Case Study of the Australian Open Tennis Tournament. In: The Impacts of Events: Proceedings of International Event Research Conference. Allen, J, ed. Australian Centre for Event Management University of Technology, Sydney, Lindfield, N.S.W., pp. 158-177.

Abstract

The assessment of the impacts of tourism and events, as perceived by the host community, has received increasing attention in recent years, and several researchers have worked on developing scales for this purpose (See for example Lankford & Howard, 1994; Ap & Crompton, 1998; Delamere, 1997). Scale development is a complex procedure if the purpose is to be able to demonstrate the validity and reliability of the measure, and there are often conflicting aims that necessitate trade offs in terms of the characteristics of the scale. For example, in an effort to ensure content validity, many resident perception scales include large numbers of items. However, lengthy and cumbersome scales often seem daunting to respondents and low response rates may be the result. Additionally, they may encourage response set; that is, a tendency to lapse into patterns of response rather than genuinely reading and reacting to the questions. There is increasing interest amongst both public and private sector event managers in the assessment of the social impacts of events in accordance with the growing emphasis on triple bottom line reporting. However, most of the recently available social impact assessment methods are either unwieldy or lack content validity. This report presents the results of a study in which one of the aims was to develop a compressed generic instrument to evaluate the impacts of events on the host community and to facilitate comparisons. The compressed scale development procedure has been previously reported (Fredline, Jago and Deery, 2002, 2003b), therefore, this paper presents the results of a test of the scale in a case study at the Australian Open Tennis Tournament 2003. This study was funded by Australia’s Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre. The compressed instrument was administered via a telephone interview of local residents in the Melbourne region. A very high level of positive perception was observed in the community with regard to this event, and unlike previous case studies on other events, almost no negative sentiment was reported. In other respects though, the results have substantial commonality with previous research using a much longer scale. This implies that the compressed instrument retains the content validity of the longer version but demonstrates a substantial improvement in parsimony. Additionally, qualitative data also collected have been analysed to further explore the social impacts, which appear to be associated specifically with this event.

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