Does tourism really affect the happiness of residents? The evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Tourism and happiness are highly related concepts. Research streams in happiness and tourism fall into two main categories: (1) tourists’ happiness and (2) residents’ happiness. In this paper, we followed the second research stream by focusing on the relationship between residents’ happiness and tourism. The purpose of this paper is to discover whether tourism development in a destination contributes to the happiness of residents by analyzing secondary data sources, which differs from other studies that have examined this research question using primary data sources. The data used in this research comes from the records of public bodies. Our findings indicate that residents in marine-based mass tourism regions are less happy than residents in cultural heritage tourism destinations.