Residents' Understandings of Tourism in the Turks and Caicos Islands, British West Indies

英属西印度群岛特克斯和凯科斯群岛居民对旅游业的了解

• 批准号: 0621241
• 负责人: John Gatewood
• 金额: $ 8.85万
• 依托单位: Lehigh University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-07-15 至 2009-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0621241&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Residents; Understandings; Tourism; Turks; Caicos

Tourism accounts for a large portion of the cross-cultural contacts occurring in the contemporary world. This project will use innovative cognitive anthropological methodologies to investigate the local effects of tourism. The researchers aim to discover residents' understandings of tourism and its impacts in a developing tourism destination, the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). The TCI government has worked with outside developers and hotels to craft an upscale tourism program. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the resident population regards tourism positively but does not fully appreciate its impacts. This two-year research project is designed to reveal the range of understandings among residents with respect to several concerns: knowledge of the tourism system, perceptions of tourists, evaluation of tourism's impacts, appreciation of economic opportunities, and the sources of information that they rely on with respect to tourism. The theoretical framework for the research comes from cognitive anthropology, which is concerned with how humans develop collective mental models of natural and social domains. In particular, the project will develop a composite cultural model of tourism and then refine and test that model using systematically collected survey data. The scientific benefits of the project include: providing a new case study of tourism in the Caribbean region; demonstrating an innovative methodology that conjoins qualitative and quantitative data; and illustrating how cultural model theory and cultural consensus theory can be used together to produce a more complete cognitive ethnography. The research also will contribute to the education of American students who will participate in the research and to evaluation of economic policy initiatives that support tourism as a development strategy.

在当代世界发生的跨文化接触中，旅游业占很大一部分。这个项目将使用创新的认知人类学方法来调查旅游业对当地的影响。研究人员旨在发现特克斯和凯科斯群岛（TCI）发展中的旅游目的地居民对旅游业及其影响的理解。TCI政府与外部开发商和酒店合作，制定了一个高档旅游项目。坊间证据表明，常住人口对旅游业持积极态度，但并未充分认识到其影响。这个为期两年的研究项目旨在揭示居民对以下几个问题的理解范围：对旅游系统的了解，对游客的看法，对旅游影响的评估，对经济机会的评价，以及他们对旅游所依赖的信息来源。该研究的理论框架来自认知人类学，它关注人类如何发展自然和社会领域的集体心理模型。特别是，该项目将开发一个旅游的复合文化模型，然后使用系统收集的调查数据对该模型进行完善和测试。该项目的科学效益包括：提供加勒比地区旅游业的新案例研究；展示结合定性和定量数据的创新方法；并说明了文化模型理论和文化共识理论如何一起使用，以产生更完整的认知民族志。这项研究还将有助于教育参与研究的美国学生，并有助于评估将旅游业作为一项发展战略的经济政策倡议。