| Summary: | Studies on resident perceptions toward the impacts of tourism development provide crucial feedbacks
and information to the local tourism authorities. This study, in particular, investigated the effects of ecotourism activities from environmental, economic, and social perspectives using social exchange theory as the theoretical foundation. A total of 200 questionnaires were distributed to the local residents who live
in Kukup, a small fishing town adjacent to Pulau Kukup National Park to assess their views on the above aspects. The sampling procedure employed was a systematic random sampling of every 5th house in
Kukup with a random starting point. The results of the descriptive analysis indicated that the residents, in general, perceived the environmental, economic, and social impacts in both positive and negative manners. However, residents tend to score higher on the positive aspects than the negative aspects of all three dimensions of impacts. In particular, residents rated the economic impacts very positively than environmental and social impacts. Besides the above, the ANOVA and t-test analyses also suggest that the resident perceptions varied significantly according to age, education, occupation, and income.
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