Recreation, Sport & Tourism

Interests: Casey Moran is a doctoral student in the Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism at the University of Illinois. She is currently involved in several research projects under the direction of Dr. Sharon Zou, namely a study investigating the potential impacts of a fee change at Indiana Dunes National Park. Her personal research interests relate to tourism marketing, heritage tourism, and the impacts of tourism on local communities. Specifically, she is interested in the effects of heritage tourism on the psychological health and empowerment of local communities, finding more effective ways to draw in appropriate tourism populations for the community, and reducing the negative impacts on the local community once tourists have arrived. Previous research she has worked on concerned the expansion of social carrying capacity to be more relevant to residents of tourism destinations, social motivators to travel to a destination over different time horizons, and a quasi-experimental study that mapped the stressors in tourism and non-tourism communities using ArcGIS.