Compare methods

	Doxey Irridex Analysis	Limits of Acceptable Change
Field	Tourism Studies	Tourism Recreation
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1975	1985
Originator	George V. Doxey	George H. Stankey, David N. Cole, Robert C. Lucas, Margaret E. Petersen & Sidney S. Frissell
Type	Stage model of host-community attitudes toward tourism	Condition-based recreation and wilderness planning pipeline
Seminal source	Doxey, G. V. (1975). A causation theory of visitor-resident irritants: methodology and research inferences. In The Impact of Tourism: Sixth Annual Conference Proceedings of the Travel Research Association (pp. 195-198). San Diego, CA: Travel Research Association.	Stankey, G. H., Cole, D. N., Lucas, R. C., Petersen, M. E., & Frissell, S. S. (1985). The Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) System for Wilderness Planning. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT-GTR-176. Ogden, UT: USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.
Aliases	Irridex, Irritation Index, Doxey's Index of Tourist Irritation, Visitor-Resident Irritant Analysis	LAC Planning Framework, Acceptable Change Planning, LAC Wilderness Planning System
Related	3	3
Summary	Doxey's Irritation Index, or Irridex, is a framework for understanding how a host community's attitude toward tourism changes as the destination grows. Proposed by George Doxey in 1975 as a causation theory of visitor-resident irritants, it holds that residents pass through four sequential states as tourist numbers and impacts intensify: euphoria, when tourism is new and welcomed; apathy, when it becomes routine and purely commercial; irritation, when saturation strains local life; and antagonism, when residents openly resent and blame tourists. The model's enduring appeal is that it frames resident hostility not as random but as the predictable end of an unmanaged growth process, and it pairs naturally with the Tourism Area Life Cycle to explain the social side of a destination's evolution and to warn managers to act before goodwill turns to antagonism.	The Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) framework is a planning system for managing recreation and wilderness areas that shifts the central question from 'how much use is too much?' to 'how much change in conditions is acceptable, and where?' Developed by George Stankey and colleagues for the USDA Forest Service in 1985, LAC accepts that any human use produces some change and that managers must therefore define, in advance, the conditions they are willing to tolerate. The framework proceeds through a structured sequence: partition the area into opportunity classes, choose measurable indicators of resource and social conditions, set explicit standards for each indicator by class, monitor those indicators over time, and trigger management actions whenever a standard is exceeded. By anchoring decisions to desired conditions rather than to a single carrying-capacity number, LAC turns visitor management into a transparent, defensible, and monitorable process.