Residents' quality of life and attitudes toward education tourism development in North Cyprus

Tourism has become one of the largest and fastest growing economic sector in the world. However, the development and changes of a tourism destination has a number of effects especially on people who are living there. Tourism is related with social, economic, and environmental benefits and according to this; the quality of life (QOL) of the local people has many connections with the development of tourism. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of demographics, the areas of quality of life and residential statuses on the attitudes of the local people in North Cyprus about the development of future educational tourism. The important contribution of this study is to identify the predictive power of different dimensions of quality of life, demographic profile structure and residential status on attitudes towards the development of educational tourism in the North Cyprus. The acquisition of support from local residents is a very important area in terms of the sustainability of educational tourism and the quality of life has an important role in determining the attitude of the people. The working group consisted of 523 local people in five different regions where Northern Cyprus Universities were located. In order to measure the attitudes towards the development of future education tourism, a scale of 3 items was used, and the "Tourism and Quality of Life Scale" which consisting of 49 items and modified by Liang and Hui (2016), were used in the study. The results of this study generally have shown that the positive attitudes of local people depend on the community well-being domain of ETQOL in particular. Furthermore, the results show that the middle and high income groups have more positive attitudes than low and very high income groups towards education tourism development. In addition, homeowners and rentals have a positive attitude towards the development of educational tourism compared to those residing in the dormitories. In addition, no significant differences were found regarding age, gender, educational status, number of children and marital status. Keywords: Quality of life, education tourism, tourism development, North Cyprus, resident attitudes.