This book offers a fresh perspective of on some of the cutting-edge methodological approaches being used among scholars conducting work on social impacts of tourism. These works are international in focus, spanning across Europe (e.g., Austria, Croatia, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey) and Asia (e.g., Hong Kong, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey). The authors employ qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods designs and some of the notable focus areas include comparative studies of residents’ perspectives of tourism (i.e., involving impacts of various forms of tourism and community children’s perceptions of tourism); statistical techniques such as multigroup invariance analysis and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis; and the employment of novel measurement tools such as the implicit association test involving residents’ implicit stereotypes of visitors from multiple countries and the utilization of the human scale development to identify residents’ needs and satisfiers. This edited volume will most assuredly advance the methodological focus of research on social impacts of tourism moving forward. This book will be of great interest to all upper-level students and researchers in tourism, planning and related fields. The chapters in this volume were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

This book provides the reader with a fresh perspective of the use of theory in the body of research centred on social impacts of tourism. Theory is advanced in three primary forms within this volume. Some apply novel frameworks (e.g., theory of interaction ritual; degrowth paradigm; and mere exposure theory) to contexts involving destination residents. Others consider uniquely complemented various theoretical frameworks (e.g., social exchange theory and affect theory of exchange; Weber’s theory of rationality and Foucauldian constructs; and emotional solidarity and cognitive appraisal theory). Still others develop theoretical frameworks (e.g., influence of presumed influence model, elaboration likelihood model, and social exchange theory; tourist-resident social contact; quality of life; and socio-ecological systems theory and chaos theory) for others to potentially consider and test. The chapters in this edited volume contribute to the evolving advancement of theoretical applications within the research area of social impacts of tourism. This book will be of great interest to all upper-level students and researchers in tourism, planning and related fields. The chapters in this volume were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Sustainable Tourism.