Abstract
The demand of rural tourism industry has increased among the urbanites in South Korea, in due to the increase of leisure activity and the emergence of ageing society. Rural amenity resources are gaining various interests, in the value creation and promotion of tourism. In this study, the propensities of city dwellers were separated by life-style classification, and each affinity to the rural amenity resources was examined in accordance with the separation. A questionnaire survey of urbanites in the southern area of Gyeonggi-do, the most populous province in South Korea, was conducted to analyze the preference of city dwellers about rural amenity resource and life-style of themselves. For statistical verification, $IBM^{(R)}$ $SPSS^{(R)}$ Statistics 20 software was used for frequency, reliability, factor and multiple regression analysis of this research. The results of the statistical analyses found a noticeable characteristic in life-style classification. The affinities of urbanites can be classified into four congregations of life-style factors in this statistical model. Each congregation of the factors was named as 'Self-development-oriented', 'Leisure-oriented', 'Achievement-oriented', and 'Culture-oriented' life-style, to represent the characteristics for convenience' sake. Among these styles, only 'Self-development-oriented' and 'Achievement-oriented' showed the positive correlation with rural amenity resources in the multiple regression analysis. In addition, the rural amenity resources were also analyzed in accordance with the life-styles classification of urbanites. City dwellers showed the highest interest to the 'natural resource management facility resource' in natural resources, the 'traditional heritage resource' in cultural resources, and the 'community resource' in social resources. Meanwhile, they showed less interest to 'agricultural and scenery resources' in natural resources, 'specialty production resource' in cultural resources, and 'cooperative farming' in social resources. These characteristics can be constructed as meaning that the urbanites who concern self-development and achievement of their lives have high interest in rural amenity resources, and the main interest of them is not 'return-to-the-farm'(歸農) but 'return-to-the-home'(歸村).
