Assessing tourism's more complex consequences

Runyan, Dean and Chung-Tong Wu, “Assessing Tourism's more Complex Consequences,” Annals of Tourism Research, October/December 1979, VI(4):448–463. The development of tourism can have extensive physical, social and economic impacts. Certain of these impacts can be classified as relatively complex: those that take many variables to describe, are difficult to quantify and which are sensitive to policy or other difficult-to-predict interventions. The involvement of residents in an impact estimation process can serve to both forecast and appraise these relatively complex impacts. Relatively few techniques are available for estimation of complex impacts which do not rely almost exclusively on the intuition of professionals. Those that make use of lay individual input include Delbecq procedures, Delphi and IMPASSE. These techniques can be used to identify potential impacts by structuring group discussions. A two-stage approach to estimating complex impacts is proposed.