Residents’ Perceptions Towards the Touristic Development of a Rural Mexican Community

Abstract

Tourism has an important economic contribution at a global level; however, in some cases, this is not reflected in the benefit of the inhabitants of tourist destinations, since in an unusual way their opinion is asked for their place of residence to become a tourist destination. Therefore, in order to know the perception of the inhabitants of a community in northern Mexico to become a tourist development pole, a study was carried out with reference of the Social Exchange theory.To achieve this aim, a questionnaire was applied to 367 representatives of families of this population. Exploratory factor analysis was performed in SPSS version 27, followed by structural equation modelling in AMOS 27. The findings show that as long as the inhabitants perceive that they will receive a direct benefit in terms of socioeconomic aspects that will improve their quality of life, as well as improvements in the town’s infrastructure, they will accept that their town will become a tourist attraction with the consequences that this entails.