It provides a lens through which researchers can observe how residents perceive the behaviour of tourists and identify them as unacceptable. Social representation is particularly applicable in this research as deviant behaviour is a social construct. Social representation is how people interpret the world, and in the process convert their understandings into particular social realities for themselves and others (Martikainen, 2019). Researchers note the flexibility of applying the theory and thus have employed it to understand social representations of ideas, behaviours, and concepts in various research fields. Social representation is a growing field of study that has attracted researchers from different disciplines (Monterrubio & Andriotis, 2014). For such an approach, social representation theory is a useful framework to explore residents' representations of tourists' deviant behaviour (Monterrubio & Andriotis, 2014). The study utilises Reddit data encompassing experiences of residents from multiple countries to capture a more comprehensive perception of tourist deviant behaviour than has been available in the tourism impacts literature, which has been largely based on destination specific case studies (Bhati & Pearce, 2016). Thus, this research aims to take a holistic approach to understand the perception of deviant behaviour by residents of tourist destinations. In line with what Bhati and Pearce ( 2016) stated about vandalism (as a type of deviant behaviour), narrowly defining deviant behaviour makes it challenging for destinations and tourism businesses to manage it. For instance, deviant behaviour like parents who take children on holidays during school terms and tourists who approach wild animals too closely receive little attention in tourism impact studies though both could be defined as deviant behaviour. This approach ignores the nuanced and complex reality of deviance. For instance, studies have tended to focus on more visible deviant behaviour, such as the use of drugs, crime, and nudism (e.g., Ying et al., 2019). Consequently, deviant behaviour within a tourism context has, to date, been very narrowly defined. While previous studies have been undertaken to understand the perception of tourist behaviour by residents from the perspective of tourism impacts, this work has not been done explicitly within the context of a deviance framework (e.g., Hua et al., 2020 Piuchan et al., 2018). It is in this setting that we see the potential for conflict between host and tourist cultures. Instead, while tourists may be removed from the social rules of their own home environment, they are situated within a location where other, potentially different, social values and norms exist. Recognising tourist behaviour as potentially deviant in the eyes of the host society also means recognising that the tourist experience does not occur in a liminal space, a bubble within which there are no social rules. However, activities such as excessive drinking, violent behaviour, and disregarding destinations' social norms have been identified as deviant tourist behaviour (Thurnell-Read, 2012). Such behaviour, as a socio-culturally defined entity, possesses fuzzy boundaries and varies across societies and time (Lugosi, 2019). It is argued that tourism happens in a liminal space (Tolkach et al., 2017), and is hedonistic (Carr, 2002a, 2002b), which contributes to tourists engaging in what non-tourists (including destination residents) perceive to be deviant behaviour. Tourists sometimes engage in behaviour that is unacceptable to residents (Thurnell-Read, 2012), which adversely impacts residents' quality of life and disrupts their everyday life (López, 2020). Often, at the heart of the problem are residents' perception of some types of tourist behaviour that are labelled as deviant. Destinations are struggling with viable solutions to anti-tourism sentiments to ensure the long-term prosperity and co-existence of the different stakeholders (Gössling et al., 2020). While the pandemic may have paused such sentiments, it has done nothing to change the underlying causes, though there has been much talk of the opportunity to do so offered by the pandemic (Andelane & Hollingworth, 2020). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a rising wave of anti-tourism sentiments had been observed in many destinations (Coldwell, 2017).
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