Developing local community’s perceived impacts scale on ecotourism development in Tasik Kenyir, Malaysia

This paper presents the findings on the development of key attributes that form the local community’s perceived impacts scale of ecotourism development in Tasik Kenyir, Malaysia. The study was guided by the specific objective: to develop a measurement scale that captures the local community’s perceived impacts on ecotourism development in Tasik Kenyir. Attributes from previous researches on perceptions of local community towards ecotourism impacts were combined with newly found factors obtained through initial exploratory investigation on the local community to produce a new set of measurement scale. Questionnaires were distributed to 260 heads of household in three villages in Tasik Kenyir. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used to reduce the 46 attributes on perceptions of the communities. The findings of the study indicate that 25attributesare identified to have significant relations on the local community’s perceived impacts scale in ecotourism development; that selected attributes are regrouped into 7 factors. These factors account for 68% of the variances in the data set. The findings of this study can be used to conduct further studies on empowerment of communities in ecotourism development.