Clustering Residents Based on Perceptions Toward Tourism Growth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

The development of tourism sector in the region will deliver benefits for local community including the increase sales level, more job openings, the increase in the ability of people to learn foreign languages, encouragement to repair facilities and infrastructure; but on the other hand, it have negative impacts on local residents like congestion, pollution, noise, and rise in criminal cases. Yogyakarta, as a tourism destination, faces the same problem. The tourism growth in that place makes raise the pros and cons among the community. Some people are more pleased with increasing number of tourist arrivals to their area because it gives the direct impact on their economic development, but other people show their objection to its negative impact, especially the traffic. Therefore, a study in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, was conducted to identify and analyze the residents’ perception as the variable considered for the local government to arrange the policy toward tourism development. A total of 180 completed questionnaires were obtained from 200 respondents approached. The respondents were drawn from different walks of life by considering various aspects such as age, occupation, distance between home and the nearest tourism object, income, origin. Non-hierarchy clustering method—k-means cluster—is used to analyze and identify the respondents’ perceptions of the tourism growth. From the calculation using SPSS 16, it is found that there are three clusters formed based on eight variables: positive residents (47%)—people who are delighted and enjoying the tourism environment; negative residents (21%)—people who do not like the tourism, especially for its impact on traffic; and opportunist residents (32%)—people agree that tourism causes traffic, but they are not care about that because they get benefit impact from tourism activities for their income. In conclusion, from the data clustering, it is informed that the growth of the tourism in Yogyakarta has provided more benefits than costs to the residents.