A Quantitative Comparative Analysis of Residents’ Attitudes Towards Cultural Events in Greece

Cultural events are an integral part of Greece’s history, tradition and economy and the majority of them are held during the summer period in open-air spaces and sites with historical importance in countless tourism destinations of the country. This paper presents the perceptions of local residents of three different prefectures (Xanthi, Chios, Rethymno) on the quality, organization and impacts of annual cultural events in their communities. Taking into consideration the population of each selected region and using a simple random sampling, a total number of 1,100 questionnaires were successfully collected (Xanthi: 484, Chios: 374, and Rethymno: 242). A cluster analysis (Κ-Means) was adopted in order to classify the existing observations into homogeneous groups and suggest policy measures to maximize the positive impacts of such events and reduce their negative impacts. Segmenting residents’ perceptions towards local tourism events is of great importance as residents’ behaviors and attitudes can positively influence the satisfaction and overall experience of tourists attending the events. A reliability analysis of internal consistency was also conducted, which concerns Likert-type scale questions that are used in the measurement, while Chi-square test provides a non-parametric correlation analysis among extracted clusters of each region and the demographic characteristics of the respondents. Hence, the patterns of a quantitave comparative analysis based on the residents’ attitudes provide practitioners with valuable information on the improvement, development and promotion of cultural events and their classification offers significant opportunities for the implementation of strategic marketing plans. Since this research focused on individual cultural events of specific destinations of Greece, represented from an exploratory sample of the residents of these destinations, it would be beneficial for future researchers to conduct further research using quantitative and qualitative methods to deeply explore residents’ perceptions, discourse of this topic at other cultural events throughout Greece or abroad and/or conduct comparative analyses between these events.