B. Bynum Boley

University of Georgia | UGA · Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources

In recognition that not all travel experiences are evaluated equally, there is the opportunity for different travel experiences to generate varying levels of “Social Return.” “Social Return” is the amount of positive social feedback that one's social media posts of travel generate. This paper develops the Social Return Scale (SRS) and uses the scal...

Urban greenways have received significant attention due to their many publicized benefits and costs that make them contentious recreational developments. Most prior studies have approached urban greenways from a demand side perspective solely focused on their users. This study adds to the literature by taking a supply-side approach to assessing res...

This study expands Perdue, Long, and Allen’s (1990) original model of resident attitudes toward tourism in two significant ways. It first proposes Weber’s theory of formal and substantive rationality (WFSR) as a way to strengthen social exchange theory. Secondly, WFSR is operationalized by using the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS)...

largely focus on sustainable tourism with a specific interest in the unique natural and cultural resources of tourism destinations. These innate natural and cultural features interest him because he sees the sustainable management and marketing of them as being vital to two of the primary goals of tourism development: 1) the ability to effectively...

Despite empowerment playing a crucial role in sustainable tourism development, there have yet to be scales developed to measure whether residents perceive themselves as being psychologically, socially, or politically empowered from tourism. To address this gap, the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) was developed following Churchill'...

Urban deer management (UDM) decision‐makers face social, ecological, regulatory, and economic pressures when creating an agreeable deer management plan for stakeholders. Historically, decision making techniques (e.g. consensus‐based analyses) have not effectively balanced UDM elements leading to short‐lived management progress. Structured decision...

The effective response to managing wildlife-associated diseases, such as chronic wasting disease (CWD), requires meaningful cooperation between managers and affected groups. According to self-determination theory (SDT), a broad theory of motivation, communication efforts supportive of the basic psychological needs of autonomy , competence, and rela...

While many environmental psychologists have relied on the Wildlife Value Orientations (WVOs) scale to understand the individual patterns in cognitions and behaviors related to wildlife, limits in scope constrain its application across other topics. Conversely, Ecological Dominance Orientation (EDO), defined as preference to maintain an anthropocent...

Despite growth in National Water Trail designations year after year along with paddlesports popularity, there is little research on water trail users’ experiences within transboundary managed water trail systems. Specifically, there is a lack of evidence regarding which experiential attributes paddlers’ find important and how these transboundary zo...

Resident empowerment is an effective tool that contributes to the sustainable development of tourism. However, in many low-income countries, tourism is usually implemented through an imperialist tourism development model, questioning the sector's true intentions for this type of development. Within this backdrop, this study aims to investigate how,...

While much has been written on the influence personality has over travel behavior, few have researched the relationship between personality, social media usage, and intent to travel. This research note is one of the first to bring social media into the discussion to see how one’s personality influences their utilitarian and socially symbolic uses o...

While there has been extensive research on resident sentiment towards tourism, few have explored the uniqueness of gateway communities and their relationship to the Protected Areas (PA) surrounding them. This study explores how resident trust of PA managers and support for PAs surrounding their community can spillover to explain additional variance...

Across the U.S., the presence of white-tailed deer (deer; Odocoileus virginianus) in urban areas can create conflicts with residents (e.g., ornamental plant damage). State wildlife agencies approach urban deer management differently from traditional deer management due to diverse community groups, urban stakeholder viewpoints about deer, and other...

As people seek to manicure their online presence within the current “technomeritocracy,” there is a need to understand what sacrifices people will make to curate social media worthy travel experiences. Hence, the Social Media Sacrifice Scale was developed from the literature on identity theory and compensatory purchasing behavior to conceptualize a...

This study developed a new version of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale - the RETS 2.0 by integrating two new dimensions of empowerment – economic and environmental empowerment – that the original RETS left off. The RETS 2.0 also abbreviates the original RETS to three items per a construct, reducing response burden, and opening up spac...

As international travel begins to rebound from the pandemic, there is value in analyzing pandemic-related travel risks to know which markets are likely to come back online first. Thus, this paper examines the perceptions of travel-related risks, governmental response, and intention to travel to the U.S. from the top five inbound international marke...

While there have been a host of studies investigating the COVID-19 pandemic's influence on outdoor recreation, few have investigated the socio-demographic composition and motivations of visitors who increased their outdoor recreation during this period and if these users will continue recreating at the same level as the pandemic wanes. This study s...

With many international entities pushing for the protection of 30% of terrestrial and marine habitat by 2030 through the 30x30 global initiative, the expansion of protected areas (PA) will inevitably interface with populations carrying lived experiences of PA management as well as their community’s collective memory of how the promises and outcomes...

The purpose of this chapter is to bring attention to the interrelationships and interdependencies between three of the most influential constructs within the tourism literature: destination competitiveness, sustainability, and resident quality of life. While each of these topics has its own body of literature, this chapter makes the case there is a...

While the tourism literature has extended Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) in many ways, there has been little use of the gap scores associated with the differences between a destination’s perceived performance on salient destination-level attributes and the importance tourists place on these attributes to see how these positive or negative di...

While many have noted how country-level animosity negatively influences destination choice, little is known about factors that may dissipate animosity's pervasive influence over destination choice. This paper uses Cognitive Dissonance Theory as the theoretical backing to investigate how social return, a consonant cognition focused on the anticipate...

With social media increasing the ability of tourists to conspicuously consume travel experiences, tourism marketers need tools to better understand the motivations behind why tourist post travel pictures for status. This paper uses Optimal Distinctiveness Theory to develop the Conspicuous Consumption Posting Scale (CCPS). Results demonstrate the co...

Since the early 1980s, Quality Deer Management (QDM) has been used widely to manage populations of white‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in the United States. Since 2000, QDM has been a catalyst behind a suite of deer management cooperatives (DMCs) forming across the United States. Although QDM has grown in popularity among North American deer...

Citizen science (CS) is gaining recognition as a valuable approach to meet data needs for environmental projects while fostering collaboration between scientists and members of the public. Despite increasing implementation of CS by natural resource entities, organizations’ motivations for engaging in CS remain poorly understood. We examined the uti...

Though “iconic species” are mentioned throughout the environmental discourse, this concept is seldom operationalized in conservation research. This study proposes the Iconic Species Scale (ISS) to assess perceptions of iconic characters and the value of species. The ISS was developed and tested across two species (sea turtles/live oaks) and two par...

Despite growing calls to include important stakeholder groups in order to ensure the sustainable management and marketing of tourism, there has been little concurrent research on residents and tourists’ perceptions of cultural heritage sites. This study aims to compare tourists’ and residents’ perceptions for tourism attributes in Shandiz, one of n...

With peer perceptions of vacation pictures on social media becoming firmly entrenched into the tourist psyche and the destination selection process, this paper buttresses the burgeoning research on social return’s influence on travel behaviour through additional theoretical development and empirical investigation. The paper assesses the cross-cultu...

Resident attitude research often combines heterogenous types of tourism together asking residents to evaluate support for all types of tourism rather than parsing out the intricacies associated with different types of tourism. This study deviates by applying Weber's Theory of Formal and Substantive Rationality (WTFSR) to compare the divergent effec...

Although research indicates deer management cooperatives (DMCs) provide the needed means to influence large-scale resource management changes, research has yet to identify which conservation initiatives DMC members find important and would likely implement. Therefore, we performed an Importance-Likelihood Analysis to ascertain which conservation in...

Grounded in Weber’s theory of formal and substantive rationality, this study aims to examine the influences of economic and noneconomic factors, namely resident empowerment and trust, on resident support for gaming tourism, a controversial type of tourism development. In particular, with data collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the s...

Increasingly, guests are choosing accommodations not solely for the functional service quality they provide, but on the experiential and symbolic aspects of lodging stays. While some have begun to compare the influence of functional and self-congruity on lodging choice, there has yet to be a comparison between franchise and independent accommodatio...

In this chapter, we problematize the idea of empowerment as a condition for just tourism governance. Namely, we propose a forward-looking notion of tourism governance that integrates and connects justice and resident empowerment. Moreover, we also argue that the principle of empowerment must reach beyond the political realm and embrace empowerment'...

White‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) populations and deer hunter participation on federal public lands within the Appalachian Mountains of the southeastern United States have been declining over the last 30 years. Our study focused on Chattahoochee National Forest hunters in North Georgia, a region that has sustained a 64% decline in buck har...

Despite the growing literature arguing for the consideration of community perspectives in tourism destination governance, little is understood about how residents' connection to nature affects their perceptions of and responses to tourism. This is especially relevant for rural areas rich in nature as many of them have become refugees for urban dwel...

Last chance tourism (LCT) has received significant attention within the academic literature and popular press because of its controversial nature of bringing travelers to threatened places. However, little theory has been applied to understand why travelers gravitate toward this controversial type of tourism. Hence, this work combines the value–bel...

While peer-to-peer accommodation research is increasingly cognizant of various stakeholders impacted by the rising popularity of this disruptive phenomenon, one stakeholder remains understudied– the host. This study uses a Deductive Qualitative Analysis to explore a tripartite of peer-to-peer accommodation host identities [the entrepreneurial ident...

Despite numerous attempts at operationalising ecotourism, none have explicitly incorporated the three tenets of ecotourism (i.e. nature, education, and sustainability) into scale development with the purpose of identifying ecotourists from non-ecotourists. Therefore, we used a combination of Churchill and Rossiter’s scale development frameworks to...

Our study explored the utility of using Importance‐Satisfaction Analysis (ISA) to identify critical attributes to deer management cooperative (DMC) member satisfaction. With white‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginanus) management by landowners becoming an increasingly popular conservation tool, DMCs represent an approach by private landowners and hunt...

Though residents’ involvement is extremely important to foster sustainable tourism, explanations as to why locals become involved are rather scant. This research explores the role that emotional solidarity and empowerment play in explaining residents’ involvement in planning for tourism. We collected a sample of 415 residents residing in three coun...

Despite place attachment’s prominence within the environmental psychology literature, the scales and items used to measure place attachment vary significantly, hindering the ability of researchers to rally behind a standard measure. These types of discrepancies hamper the ability of researchers to directly compare findings across communities and co...

In urban destinations, Peer-to-peer accommodations (P2PAs), e.g., Airbnb, HomeAway, have experienced exponential growth and are shifting the vertices of the residential and tourism landscapes. As the nodes of visitor access appear deeper within backstage places, resident non-hosts face socio-cultural impacts that can influence their attitudes towar...

For US travelers, access to Cuba as a tourism destination has changed markedly since 2014. Policy changes that permitted US leisure travel to the island resulted in a considerable increase in US arrivals to Cuba. With this increase came concerns that US travelers would generate undesirable economic and cultural change on the island. This work aims...

Anglers face constraints that influence participation and dropout rates. Some recreational anglers may be able to negotiate constraints by altering the timing or frequency of participation, acquiring new skills, or modifying non‐recreational aspects such as family or work responsibilities. We consider data collected via a mail survey from Georgia‐r...

Despite an influx of ecotourism research since the term was first coined, it is still not entirely clear why tourists choose ecotourism over other tourism experiences. While most of the previous literature assumes that ecotourism is preferred by travelers for moral reasons, emerging evidence suggests that opportunities to project one’s social statu...

Increasing demand for water-based recreation comes with the need for recreation site managers to consider how to best satisfy different stakeholder groups. However, much of the previous water-based recreation literature has treated resident users and tourist users as one homogeneous group despite differences in frequency of use, proximity to site,...

Disciplines such as marketing and education have begun to question the benefits of incorporating reverse polarity items (e.g. a mixture of negatively and positively worded items) into multi-item scales due to such items’ degradation of scale dimensionality. The tourism literature, however, has yet to critique this practice due to the commonly held...

For tourism to be entirely sustainable, one cannot travel. This is impossible. This paradox is particularly evident within last chance tourism (LCT), where tourists, seeking experiences with vanishing animals and land/seascapes, can accelerate the decline of those very attractions. Though recent studies hint that those with the highest intentions t...

While there is agreement over the pivotal role accommodations have in the tourist experience, little is known about why tourists gravitate towards franchise or independent accommodations. This paper compares U.S. tourists' perceptions of the performance of franchise and independent accommodations on a range of functional, experiential, and symbolic...

With resident empowerment widely recognized as a prerequisite for sustainable tourism development, this study tested how residents’ perceived knowledge of tourism affects their perceptions of psychological, social, and political empowerment through tourism, and how these, in turn, lead to their political action regarding tourism using Rocha’s (1997...

Researchers have recently begun to explore residents’ perceptions of short-term vacation rental (STVR) from both qualitative and quantitative approaches, but there is still a need for strong theoretical underpinnings to support this growing body of research. This study addresses this gap through applying a theoretical perspective that combines Soci...

As anglers become increasingly diverse, fisheries managers are challenged to find ways to satisfy users with divergent preferences while conserving a limited resource on a limited budget. With this management challenge in mind, this study combines previous angler specialization research with importance‐satisfaction analysis (ISA) to aid fisheries m...

Urban greenways are growing recreation and transportation amenities around the world, providing users opportunities to increase physical health, interactions with nature, and community cohesion. Their linear, connective nature specifically helps greenways offer unique benefits to urban communities compared to parks. Though studies have investigated...

Urban greenways are increasingly seen as sustainable infrastructure initiatives designed to catalyze economic development, urban renewal and healthy cities. However, there has been little consideration for how the racial and socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods influence resident support for greenways. This is important due to documented dive...

Urban greenways are increasingly seen as sustainable infrastructure initiatives designed to catalyze economic development, urban renewal and healthy cities. However, there has been little consideration for how the racial and socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods influence resident support for greenways. This is important due to documented dive...

At the core of the resident attitude literature is the general understanding that the more residents economically benefit from tourism, the more they support tourism. While a central tenet, previous research has measured resident perceptions of economically benefiting from tourism somewhat haphazardly, using four disparate directions without a comm...

Tourists are flooded with travel options making competition fierce within their consideration sets. While most research emphasizes the functional attributes of destinations, as narcissism becomes more normalized, it is of increasing interest to examine the influence socially symbolic factors have on tourist decision making. Therefore, this study so...

Due to the remote nature of their work, many Forest Service (FS) employees rely on handheld radios to communicate in the field. Effective communication among field employees and dispatchers mitigates job-related risks and improves outcomes in emergency situations. Hence, employee perceptions of the functionality of handheld radios are imperative to...

Understanding the psychological mechanisms underpinning tourists’ voluntary adoption of behaviors that minimize harm to environments and communities that support tourism is critical for the sustainability of the industry. In this study, we examined the internal attributes that lead tourists to adopt three dimensions of pro-sustainable behavior draw...

Urban greenways are receiving increased attention due to the implications they have for the sustainable development of 21st century cities. Although preferences of greenway users have been heavily investigated, research on residents’ perceptions of living in close proximity to these greenways pales in comparison. With this gap in mind, residents li...

As the relationship between Cuba and the United States evolves, many Americans are entertaining the idea of travel to Cuba. This study used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine predictors of US residents’ intentions to travel to Cuba across three time horizons: 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years. TPB constructs were administered to a cross-se...

Within resident attitude research, place attachment and empowerment are two of the most prominent non-economic constructs used to explain residents’ attitudes toward tourism. This research explores the relationship between the two and whether residents’ perceptions of place identity, place dependence and nature bonding affect perceptions of being e...

Past studies regarding " ethnic neighborhood tourism " (ENT) have primarily reflected perspectives of the ethnic minority group whose culture is represented to tourists. Therefore, this study explored how members of the ethnic " majority " group who live in the ethnic neighborhood perceive ENT in their own community. The interpretive analysis of 31...

While importance-performance analysis (IPA) is one of the most ubiquitous methodological tools utilized in tourism research, its supply-side application to residents has been lacking. Additionally, little research has examined residents' perceptions of sustainable tourism initiatives (STIs) or their community's performance on these STIs. Given this...

While gender equality and empowerment are core components of sustainable tourism, most of the literature has approached the concepts from qualitative perspectives, thus limiting the ability to empirically test for empowerment discrepancies between men and women. With this gap in mind, this study sought to test the widely held notion that empowermen...

Ethnic neighborhood tourism (ENT) has the potential to not only alter the identity of the ethnic landscape but to also influence the distribution of power and economic benefits from tourism between ethnic groups. Such unequal distribution may foster divergent attitudes toward tourism between minority residents whose culture is at the center of ENT...

Despite empowerment being a crucial component of sustainable tourism, few scholars have quantitatively operationalized empowerment and looked at how it applies to rural societies within the post-communist European Union (EU) member states. Knowing the high priority of sustainable rural development goals within the EU, empowering residents within th...

This study considers how ethnic attitudes or stereotypes held by Japanese residents (as the majority ethnic group) of Brazilian residents (as the minority ethnic group) factor into the former’s perceived emotional solidarity with the latter. The aim of this work is to (1) initially assess the factor structure of the Ethnic Attitude Scale (EAS) and...

With the maturation of the resident attitude literature beyond its initial atheoretical focus (Belise & Hoy, 1980), resident “Support for Tourism” has become the ultimate dependent variable of interest for researchers. While almost every resident attitude regression and structural equation model include some measure of “Support for Tourism,” there...

Rural sustainable tourism within CEE has been a promising diversification strategy and a relatively easily accessible means for rural households to achieve independence from the agriculture. Despite empowerment being a crucial component of this type of tourism few scholars have looked at how empowerment applies to rural societies within the post-co...

This study utilizes the Emotional Solidarity Scale (ESS) to examine the relationship between ethnic majority (Japanese) and minority (Brazilian) residents living in Oizumi, Japan. Results revealed significant differences in nine of the 10 ESS items. Resulting ESS factors from confirmatory factor analysis were then found to predict six of the eight...

Resistance to sustainability practices often stems from the industry's view that sustainable tourism requires a profitability tradeoff where the additional costs associated with sustainability do not pay off in increased economic returns, yet few studies have been attempted to prove or disprove this viewpoint. This study analyzed spending patterns...

While resident empowerment has been a central aspect of the sustainable tourism literature, difficulties of putting the concept into practice have been noted given the heterogeneous nature of communities. “Community” is often divided by kinship, age, gender and ethnicity, and such division may influence the perceptions of empowerment. The goal of t...