**2. Literature Review**

Several studies were published regarding the social impact of an uncontrolled flow of tourists. Some of them refer to the definition given by UNWTO to the Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC), i.e., "*the maximum number of people that may visit a tourist destination at the same time without causing destruction of the physical, economic, or socio-cultural environment and an unacceptable decrease in tourist satisfaction*" [7]. Various attempts were made to quantitatively assess the TCC, setting a maximum number of tourists, beyond which the destination begins to decay [8]. Yet, as Saveriades (2000) pointed out, there is no universally accepted definition of TCC [9] and no unique model is applicable to asses it for each tourist destination. The methodologies are serving many different purposes and are getting uneven results [10]. The reason for the lack of a unique method is that the approach is strongly influenced by the intrinsic characteristics of the venue taken into consideration.

The UNWTO identifies five types of TCC [11]:


Regarding socio-cultural capacity, UNWTO refers to the tourist's perception and the quality of experience without mentioning the social impact of tourism on resident citizens.

Several authors evaluate the experience of tourists and the social impact that the flow of tourists generates on residents by means of survey-based questionnaires [12–14], the processing, administration, and analysis of which is very long.

Additionally, in recent years, the European Commission has been working to achieve the objectives of sustainable tourism development set out in Agenda 2030. In 2013, it introduced the European Tourism Indicators Systems (ETIS) [15]. It is a management, information, and monitoring tool specifically intended for tourism destinations, which supports the activity of collecting and analysing data with the overall goal of assessing the impact of tourism on a destination. The system aims to identify the key problems and determine the best intervention strategies for the management of the tourist flow.

ETIS lists 43 main indicators and other optional ones, dividing them in four categories:


Each of these categories is then divided into criteria and sub criteria. Table 1 is an extract of the ETIS indicators relating to the criteria required to assess the social and cultural impact of tourism.


**Table 1.** European Tourism Indicators Systems (ETIS) core indicators [15].

The first, third and fourth indexes are easy to compute because they require easily available data (the number of tourists, the number of beds in accommodations, and the number of second homes). The second index is more complex because the percentage of residents who are satisfied with tourism in the destination is not an easily measurable value.

For each indicator, the European Commission defines: the reason for measurement, the data requirements, the method of calculation, the frequency of data collection, the reporting format, and the suggestion of actions (regarding indicator C.1.2, see Table 2). When the data to quantitatively measure ETIS indicators is missing, the European Commission suggests using questionnaires as helping tools. The European Commission has also prepared a predefined questionnaire for interviewing a group of people (on average 15–20 individuals) living in the tourist destination and working in the tourism sector.


**Table 2.** Data sheets for core indicators [16].

Some researchers also relied on questionnaires as a survey method to assess the evaluation of the social and cultural impact of tourism. Tudorache et al. (2017) [17] and Modica et al. (2018) [18] used ETIS indicators to assess social impact in different environments and both concluded that their new indicators should be added to ETIS in order to analyse aspects that are difficult to compute.

Despite the widespread use of questionnaires as a method of data collection, many authors define it as an obsolete method [19,20] and other ones defines it as a "static method" [21] that does not take into account the speed in which opinions and preferences change. Moreover, high-quality data requires high costs and a lot of time investment due to the needed number and time of the following groups: researchers, who design the surveys; interviewers, who collect the data; and respondents, who voluntarily provide answers. Moreover, the people interviewed often give superficial answers due to their lack of interest.

Our research proposes an alternative method to collect data and evaluate the C.1.2 indicator, which defines "*the percentage of residents who are satisfied with tourism in the destination (per month*/*season)*". We apply a method of social network analysis to assess the citizens' opinion about the social impact of tourist flows in Granada using feedbacks to posts.

### **3. Materials and Methods**

### *3.1. Social Network Analysis*

The analysis of the information provided by social networks can be useful to understand public opinion regarding the effects of mass tourism. It can also help to track changes in mass tourism continuously and in real time, while questionnaires can be used to deliver random surveys.

The advantages are:

• People's comments and reactions highlight issues of social relevance;

