Assessing the socio-cultural impact of special events: frameworks, methods, and challenges
Assessing the socio-cultural impact of special events: frameworks, methods, and challenges

Summary/Abstract: Special events, ranging from small scale community-based festivals to hallmark events such as Olympic Games, are widely recognized to generate numerous impacts on the host communities and other stakeholders. Despite the well documented in the literature need to address the diverse impacts of events, the research has, until recently, focused mostly on the evaluation of their economic impacts alone. The growing recognition of the importance of socio-cultural impacts and the scarce previous research into this area have led to a number of new studies proposing frameworks and scales for their assessment. However, due to the intangible and subjective nature of socio-cultural impacts, the existing methods have a number of assumption and limitations that are hard to overcome. This article reviews existing frameworks and methods proposed to evaluate socio-cultural impacts of events as well as examines key considerations and issues that affect their application. It highlights the challenges related to defining the scope of socio-cultural impacts, selection of study area, recognition of different stakeholders, data collection and analysis, measurement scale design, and, finally, consideration of time frame and event attendance which have been largely ignored.

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