ABSTRACT
People and communities are impacted by events. Such impacts may be positive and beneficial or negative and detrimental. This chapter addresses the generic problems of attributing the nature of social and cultural impacts of events to their specific and multifaceted causes. The chapter examines the problem of research in this area of events, characterized as being case study-driven and lacking general frameworks to assess socio-cultural impacts. This is somewhat surprising all events have a common characteristic: staging an event involves people and events attract people.
The scope and range of impacts associated with people and events are reviewed together with the methodological challenges of evaluating non-economic impacts in event research. The chapter provides a wide-ranging review of the ways to approach this challenging area of research in events.
