The Jungle of Support: What Do We Really Mean When We Say “Residents’ Support”?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have enjoyed reviewing the article. It is a valuable addition to the literature - presenting a useful way to identify between different components of term residents' support. For both scientific and practical applications this can improve future analyses. The article is well written and the argumentations are convincing. I do have a few comments:

• Regarding the articles that are analysed it is mentioned that 'the concept of support is used to address residents' support in a wide variety of situations associated with tourism in their localities, … What would add value is to get an overview of how the articles are divided over these situations and to find out if there is a relationship between the context of the study and the way the concept of residents' support is defined/applied. I could imagine that different situations (with different research questions) require a different definition/application.
• In applying the Theory of Reasoned Action to build your framework the focus is now very much on the sequence attitude, intention, behavior. Although there is a logic in applying the theory, given your argument that studies should be directed at closing the attitude-behavior gap, it does raise the question if a different theoretical base (focussed less on the step towards behaviour and e.g. more on the way attitudes are formed) would have lead to a different subdivision of the elements of residents' support. Given the large number of papers focused on the attitude part added value can perhaps be achieve by introducing a further differentiation of the concept of attitudinal support. My point is not that you should do this in this article, but it would good to discuss this and present your view on whether or not there a scope to further subdivide the three ways of understanding residents' support.
• The literature and analysis is now focused almost exclusively on resident support in tourism. There are however other fields (e.g. urban development) where resident support is also analysed. It would be worth investigating whether or not these fields suffer from the same ambiguity regarding the usage of the term, or if there is more consistency there. Of course I am not asking for a full blown analysis of all papers in other domains, but it would be worth looking for one a more papers that comment upon the usage of the term, in those specific fields.
• There are several sentences that are difficult to read because of their length (e.g. the one of page 11, starting at line 460). It would be good to shorten these.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, 

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your research, which I find very useful for the academic community and relevant for the tourism field.

Secondly, I would like to highlight some positive aspects and some things to be improved in order to enhance the readability and the utility of the paper.

The abstract is very concise and clear and so is the aim of the research. The literature you used to create the context is consistent and relevant, therefore it is one of the strengths of the paper.

The methodology is well described and designed and can be transferrable to similar studies, which enriches its potential impact on the academic community.

The findings highlight several gaps in the research literature, such as the fact that none of the papers written on the topic measured the behaviour (row 369).

Since I find the paper well written and consistent, my improvement remarks are related to:

1. adding details on rows 30-34 to facilitate the understanding („An interesting perspective on the state of the matter can be found in the review of summary 30 articles published by [2] Harrill (2004), [3] Deery, Jago & Fredline (2012), [4] Chen & Raab (2012); [5] 31 Nunkoo, Smith & Ramkissoon (2013), [6] Sharpley (2014), [7] Boley & Strzelecka (2016), and [8] 32 Gursoy, Ouyang, Nunkoo & Wei (2018).” )
2. removing the table on row 388 - it simply doubles the information presented in the chart below.
3. adding a figure to graphically present the difference between attitude, intention and behaviour. 

I wish you all the best and hope to be reading further papers from you.

Author Response

Please see the atachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf