Revisiting The Factors Affecting Resident Community Support For Tourism Development 476 Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry (TOJQI) Volume 12, Issue 10, October 2021: 476-486 Revisiting The Factors Affecting Resident Community Support For Tourism Development Dr.Radhika.P.C 1 , Dr. Bhagyalekshmi.P.C 2 1 Assistant Professor, Sacred Heart College,Thevara, Kochi, Department of Commerce, radhikapc@shcollege.ac.in, radhikacsekhar@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4875-6638 2 Associate Professor,SNGCE, Kolenchery, Ernakulam,Department of Management Studies, lekshmisanoj@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1785-0290 Abstract The community participation in tourism is considered as one of the major contributing factors towards sustainable tourism development. The present study tries to revisit the factors affecting residents' support for tourism during the pandemic situation. The study first explains the present situation of the tourism industry of Kerala and then explains the influence of perceived impacts(both benefits and costs) and perceived risk on resident community support. The present study helps the authorities to understand the factors affecting resident community support during the pandemic situation of COVID 19. The study result clearly shows that the perceived risk and the perceived costs of tourism negatively influence the community support. The result also verifies a positive relation between the perceived benefits of tourism and the resident community support. The result is based on the primary data collected from the residents of FortKochi and generalisation of the result is limited. Keywords: sustainable tourism development, perceived benefits of tourism, perceived risk, perceived costs of tourism, community support. Introduction Tourism is considered as one of the major contributors towards national development and as per the report of Kerala tourism statistics (2019), “Kerala is a leader in India when it comes to the destination management, tourism promotion as well as tourist arrivals”. The report also shows that there was a growth of 8.52% on the number foreign tourists arrivals and an increase of 17.19% on Foreign Exchange Earnings in the year 2019 when compared with 2018. All these figures highlight the importance of the tourism industry in the state and in order to reap long term returns from tourism, sustainable development is inevitable. Realising the importance of this, the Kerala government has been making a relentless effort to develop the state as a complete destination. Sustainable development acts as a basis for all these initiatives and the review shows that sustainable tourism development can be better achieved by the participation and support of the local community(Dong-Wan Ko and William P. Stewart 2002, Byrd, E. T., Bosley, H. E., & Dronberger, M. G. 2009; Lee et al. 2010; Yu et al, 2011; Robin Nunkoo and Ramkissoon, H 2011, Medet Yolal et al. 2021). The researchers have paid great attention to this topic of community support and resulted in numerous studies. As the industry is now going through a difficult situation of COVID-19 pandemic, it was considered relevant to revisit the factors affecting community support. The first part of the study explained how the spread of COVID-