Resident Perceptions toward Tourism Development at a Large Scale
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Author(s) have done a great deal of work in addressing comments, clarifying certain conclusions and improving English style and language used.
The paper has now gained significant quality, but my concerns are still related to the fact that 63 studies from different destinations in Chine have been just put into one model. I understand that authors probably carefully selected the studies and limited only to those most similar and appropriate for direct comparison, but when comparing perceptions of residents from different destinations, the lengt of tourism development and increase in tourist receipts might not be enough to illustrate actual context of each of those destinations. I recommend to put this issue as a limitation of research. Also model is lacking effect of relation to tourism(benefiting personally from tourism activities) and its impact on perceptions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Introduction
introduction provides enough background but it is an unusual practice to include almost all literature review in the introduction section. There is also a quite extensive literature review at section 2.3.
Methods
The model in Section 2.2 is not enough explained. It is not very clear which are the dependent and independent variables. Starting from this point, the hypotheses are not very clear stated in Section 2.3. The hypotheses are not figured on the theoretical model as usual. The model in Figure 1 is not similar with the empirical one presented in Figure 2 but no consistent explanation is provided.
Results
The effects presented between rows 203-209 are confusing as a negative value express a "direct effect" and a positive one an "indirect effect". The discussion section does not address the research hypotheses and the confirmation of other researches' results is confusing presented.
Conclusion
The Conclusion section is very poor and not addresses the implication of results, the research limits etc.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I agree with the current improvements of the article.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper discusses very interesting topic (residents' perception of tourism development and tourism impacts) with interesting premise of analyzing those perceptions on a large scale (around China). However, there are many open questions and issues arising from the current version od this paper, that needs to be addressed prior to any other type of review:
-English should be extensively edited (it should be done by native speaker), in order to provide clear understanding for all readers. Many sentences lack adequate structure and some English words have been used in unusual and confusing context... E.g. line 41: "The influences of tourism development have reported two different opinions." ??? or line 317: "These results indicated that attention must be paid to weakening residents’ perceptions of the negative environmental effects of tourism development to weaken their negative 318 perceptions. "- this sentence makes no sense in terms of academic discussion because "weakening" anybody's perception is not possible, especially with this given explanation (weakening... to weaken..)
- Introduction is lacking some important extant research on attitudes and perceptions of residents. Also, author(s) are mixing perception of tourism impacts (by residents) with actual impacts of tourism. It is hard to identify is it a language issue, or a very serious logical error. To illustrate, in line 45 there is this sentence: "However, other studies have noted that tourism development had negative impacts on the local economy and environment (Camisani, 2018; A Diedrich and Garcíabuades, 2009; Mcgehee and Andereck, 47 2004; Sharpley, 2014; Stylidis, 2018). " - most of the cited literature focuses on perception of tourism impacts, not actual negative impacts on local economy and environment, but the sentence in the paper could lead to completely opposite conclusion...
-Author(s) often mention term "the social culture", but this term is not common in academic literature.. similar situation is with the use of "perception case(s)" and "perception sample(s)".
-My biggest problem regarding this study is oriented on methodology - it is not clearly presented and described and I am not sure that it encompasses sufficient scientific rigor to enable adequate conclusions. First of all , it is important to understand that residents' perceptions are always contextually-dependent and it is very difficult to generalize them, or even to directly compare them... Additionally, when you take results from different studies (which used different questionnaires) with various items, on a samples from different regions- it becomes even more complex. the Methodology section does not adequately explain why six latent variables were chosen, nor are 15 observation variables completely the same in all collected studies (their numbers start from O11 and increase in rather odd mathematical order...). If those observation variables were just "extracted" from the original studies, it is important to understand that results/scores of those variables were most likely dependent on other variables in original surveys... Analyzing data gather on perceptions and measured on Likert scale is not the same as analyzing "classic" numerical data measured in numbers... Another problem is the fact that you are directly comparing perceptions of residents from one region in 2007 with perceptions of different people from different region, measured in 2014! Also Per capita GDP used as one of the exogenous variable somehow does not make sense... Was GDP per capita calculated on the regional level for residents from different regions? And was it calculated for the year when the research on their perceptions was conducted? And what does it mean statement in line 222 : "when the GDP was higher, residents were more likely to neglect the positive effects of tourism development on improvement of infrastructure construction"? "Neglecting" cannot be concluded from the data analysis... Similar situation is with the tourism receipts (substituted with "network attention" but without any given measurement scale) and length of tourism development (how do you measure the latter one - on a local/regional or national level?). In my opinion, the very premise that was used is not well elaborated and compilation of gathered data and exogenous variables (in this form) cannot be used to draw serious conclusions about relationships between variables and effects of the exogenous variables...
- In any type of research about residents' perceptions it is common to present main characteristics of research sample, and your research sample are actually residents, not studies from which you have used scores on variables...
-Extensive work has to be done in parts where research results are described and discussed : sentence in line 227 "Generally the total effect of tourist receipts on negative perceptions was positive, while negative on positive perceptions (Figure 4)." is example how NOT to interpret research results... Similar problems occur in the Conclusion
Reviewer 2 Report
Very interesting idea to use data from other research results.
Some explanation could be improved after a carefully re-reading of the paper. For example, the phrase at rows 227-228 is quite confusing. A re-formulation is required.
The figures'captions are unusually formulated. There is a large text that explain the content of the figure not a short signification of the figure.
The conclusion have to be improved. There is no answer to the question asked in the article title (How to promote sustainable tourism?) The implications both for business and academic environment should be underlined and commented. Such comments could add value to the article findings.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors analyse how to promote sustainable tourism development by investigating residents’ perceptions. The aim of the paper is clearly defined and the research sounds interesting, but the research design and the data collection are critic. At this stage, I am sceptical about this research and the weaknesses of the method don’t allow to publish the paper.
I encourage the authors to revise the paper and consider the comments below:
Methodology – It is not clear.
I invite the authors to revise the section “Data collection” and to integrate it with more details; particularly the method adopted to measure the items (rows 101-105). Why is it possible to consider the observations in each study as an independent sample? Was the aim of each research exactly the same? These considerations are essential to compare the studies and to take your research results in consideration.
How many comments of tourists were collected using “mafengwo”? What are the topics discussed by tourists? In which way were these data analysed (rows 119-125)?
Results – “Overall perception analysis”. The authors assert “These results demonstrated that on the large scale in China tourism development for 20 years was suggested to promote economic development, social-cultural improvement…” (rows 187-191). This is a very strong statement and it can be accepted only if the authors prove that their 63 cases are indeed representative of whole China, but no information about sample representativeness is provided.
The discussion section provides many interesting considerations (partly supported also by previous studies). It is not clear the added value of carrying out a quantitative analysis. Is it possible to reach the same conclusion by means of a thorough analysis of the literature? Please stress the novelty of the research and its contribution to the literature.
Finally, look carefully for typo and check the guidelines of the journal for citations and references.
