Measuring empowerment: Developing and validating the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS)

Despite empowerment playing a crucial role in sustainable tourism development, there have yet to be scales developed to measure whether residents perceive themselves as being psychologically, socially, or politically empowered from tourism. To address this gap, the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) was developed following Churchillʹs (1979) criteria for scale development. The RETS was purified through a pilot and pretest study before being tested in a three county region of western Virginia, USA. The data were initially analyzed using multiple exploratory factor analyses before being validated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results of the CFA demonstrated that the RETS displayed construct validity with standardized factor loadings ranging from 0.65 to 0.92 for the three subscales and construct reliability scores ranging from 0.85 to 0.92. The RETS is presented as a scale ready for use to measure the extent to which residents perceive themselves as being empowered or disempowered by tourism.