Residents’ Attitude Towards Pilgrims: Development And Validation Of Sustainable Religious Tourism Scale

Abstract

The research aims to develop a sustainable religious tourism (SRT) scale that can assess the attitude of the local residents towards the pilgrims. The development of the scale starts with the literature review wherein the identification of dimensions of sustainable tourism and generation of attributes have been accomplished. This is followed by refinement of the items through the content validation procedure where both domain and industry experts are consulted and made their recommendations. The refinement of items through the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed the content validation process with a rotated component matrix yielding 5 factors with a total of 30 items for the SRT scale. The psychometric properties of the SRT scale are then tested with the help of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) which establishes both the reliability and validity of the SRT scale. The SRT scale thus developed by the study consists of a total of 30 items under the 5 different dimensions of SRT.