Tourism and Socio-cultural Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 219

(Cooper et al. , 1998). Socio-cultural changes can range from impacts on a
group that are more measurable, such as the outbreak of a particular disease
and/or infection, to those that are very hard to measure, such as changes in
customs or codes of conduct. Even those factors that appear to be more
quantifiable (i.e. increases in crime rates and drug use or prostitution) can
be difficult to attribute solely to tourism (Cooper et al. , 1998). The two
fundamental means of assessing socio-cultural impact on a destination
include surveying both residents and tourists, while potential secondary
sources of information on socio-cultural impact can include criminal activ-
ity statistics, employment data, newspaper reports/articles, other related
media and notification of infectious disease statistics. Some of the data
sources are quantitative in nature while others are more subjective, and care-
ful interpretation is required (Cooper et al. , 1998). Researchers at
Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom have attempted to embed
the process of socio-cultural change within the more quantifiable economic
and environmental models. While it is recognised that the number of socio-
cultural variables that can be included in a quantifiable level is quite small,
they have come up with the following items:
(1) The ratio of tourists to host population;
(2) The number of contacts between hosts and guests for transactions;
(3) The number of contacts between hosts and guests while sharing
facilities;
(4) The number of contacts between hosts and guests for socio-cultural
purposes;
(5) Differences between hosts' and guests' age distributions;
(6) Percentage of local population coming into contact with tourists;
(7) Percentage of population working in tourism-related industries weighted
by indirect and induced employment;
(8) Tourist/host clustering;
(9) Nature of tourism. (Cooper et al. , 1998)
Although the identification of these variables may present some interesting
results, it also raises further questions about the ability to measure socio-
cultural change caused by tourism. The socio-economic indices that were
discussed earlier look only at quantifiable or measurable variables. For exam-
ple, literacy rates, access to health care and life expectancy are among the
variables used as a barometer of social well-being and are seen as a spin-off
of economic development. Tourism development as an economic activity, for
the most part, does not contribute directly to these variables, but may con-
tribute to them indirectly (see Chapter 4). As Cooper et al. (1998) point out,
the areas of social and cultural change that tourism researchers consider are
beyond these measurements and are far more qualitative and subjective in
nature, which makes numerical measurements almost impossible. This in