Residents' support for and willingness to sustain tourism development activities is conditional
upon how they perceive such developments impacting the communities where they reside
(Andereck, Valentine, Knopf & Vogt, 2005; Nicholas, Thapa, & Ko, 2009). Consequently, most resident perception research assumes a linear association between
perceptions of residents and their support towards development of tourism (Choi & Sirakaya,
2006; Gursoy, Jurowski, & Uysal, 2002; Jaafar, Noor, & Rasoolimanesh, 2015; Ko & Stewart,
2002; Nicholas et al., 2009).In the event of residents having a positive perceptions of tourism, they will be encouraged to support such developments and to look for opportunities to benefit by offering
tourism-related services and products; the perception of negative impacts, however, has the
opposite effect of discouraging residents from supporting such developments (Sharpley, 2014).