Abstract:
This study aims to identify the Impact of Ecological, Communal, and Economic Attitudes in shaping residents' support for Sustainable Tourism Development in an ecologically sensitive tropical rain forest periphery in Sri Lanka. A Self-administered questionnaire was to a conveniently drawn-sample to collect primary data. . A total of 270 completed questionnaires were collected from the residents around Sinharaj a Rain Forest, in Sri Lanka.
Residents' perception of ecological sensitivity, community attachment, economic assertiveness, and sustainable tourism development support were used to run the proposed theoretical model using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique, SmartPLS was used as the tool and the results revealed that community attitudes had a significant positive effect on ecological sensitivity, and personal economic gains had a positive effect on socio-cultural understanding, also positive tourism impact had a significant positive effect on sustainable tourism development. According to the results of this study socio cultural understanding had a significant negative effect on attitudes of negative tourism impacts.
The results of the SEM revealed that four of the 11 hypothesized paths in the proposed structural equation model were acceptable and another seven were rejected. For Descriptive statistic SPSS software were used to analyze the data and results revealed that males were highly participated to the tourism industry and also other demographic informations of this study were widely spread.
This study was conducted by considering only quantitative approaches to analyses the findings therefore based on the limitations of study future research can study qualitative approach to interpret the fmdings in depth.
Keywords: Tourism impacts, Sustainable tourism development, Community Attitudes, Resident Support for Sustainable Tourism Development, Sinharaja Rain Forest.
