Gateway community resident perceptions of tourism development: Incorporating Importance-Performance Analysis into a Limits of Acceptable Change framework

Gateway communities serve as entry points to our nation's public lands and are desirable to live within, but commonly subject to indiscriminate growth. The researchers used a variation of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) to chart resident types and their evaluations of environmental, cultural and economic attributes to better understand perspectives on tourism development. IPA was chosen because it can serve as a simple evaluative tool for communities in gateway areas interested in employing a more comprehensive Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) planning framework. Environmental attributes were found to be what make the area special with it considered both important and of real concern from each resident-type perspective. With the exception of a few items no other cultural or economic attributes were perceived the same in importance and concern as the environmental items with few meaningful differences found between resident types. In summary, IPA is a tool that can provide insight about resident perceptions while serving to inform a larger LAC tourism development framework.