Special events, ranging from small scale community-based festivals to hallmark
events such as Olympic Games, are widely recognized to generate numerous impacts on the
host communities and other stakeholders. Despite the well documented in the literature need
to address the diverse impacts of events, the research has, until recently, focused mostly on
the evaluation of their economic impacts alone. The growing recognition of the importance of
socio-cultural impacts and the scarce previous research into this area have led to a number of
new studies proposing frameworks and scales for their assessment. However, due to the
intangible and subjective nature of socio-cultural impacts, the existing methods have a number
of assumption and limitations that are hard to overcome. This article reviews existing
frameworks and methods proposed to evaluate socio-cultural impacts of events as well as
examines key considerations and issues that affect their application. It highlights the
challenges related to defining the scope of socio-cultural impacts, selection of study area,
recognition of different stakeholders, data collection and analysis, measurement scale design,
and, finally, consideration of time frame and event attendance which have been largely
ignored