The Evaluation of the Impact of Tourism on Residents: The Case of Taormina

This study aims to explore residents’ attitudes toward tourism and how these attitudes could be influenced by factors such as of one’s subjective sense of well-being and personal satisfaction with life. The study’s empirical geographical context is Taormina, a Sicilian community with high touristic frequency. Taormina is a popular resort town in Sicily with many interesting sights and attractions. The town’s historical heritage also encloses Sicily’s history: Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, the French, and the Spanish all came to the island, saw, conquered, and left (Oktay, 2006). Today, Taormina lives on tourism. Visitors flock from all the world to see its Greek-Roman theatre, to amble along its perfectly preserved Medieval streets (Roccuzzo, 2001). Our study involved 215 residents, the measurement scales used for the research were the Tourism Impact Attitude Scale-TIAS (Lankford, Howard, 1994), the Satisfaction with Life Scale-SWLS (Diener, Emmons, Larsen & Griffin, 1985) and the affective and evaluative attitude of the residents towards the tourism phenomenon (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum, 1957). Results show the measure of influence of residents’ satisfaction with life and the impact on their attitudes regarding economic and personal tourism. The results suggest that there is average life satisfaction compensates in part for the relationship shown between TIAS and Attitude Toward Global by the residents of Taormina.