Understanding tourism encounters : a phenomenology of the international travel experience /
The purpose of this study was to gain richer insight into
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
1996.
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| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=739653241&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | The purpose of this study was to gain richer insight into intercultural contact that is associated with the international travel experience. The study was conducted, in part, to address a gap between rhetoric that suggests that tourism is an effective vehicle for improving cultural understanding, and research findings that offer inconclusive results. Three general questions were addressed in this inquiry: (1) What meanings do tourists attach to intercultural contact within the context of their overall trip? (2) What factors shape and influence tourism-generated intercultural contact? (3) To what extent, and in what ways does this intercultural contact alter tourists' perceptions of the host environment and its people? To address these questions, the study adopted a naturalistic inquiry approach. This approach was selected as appropriate for the study because it yielded an emergent, emic understanding of the tourism experience. This understanding facilitated the formation of an inductively based, empirically grounded conceptualization, or phenomenology", of the international tourism experience and its intercultural dimensions. This phenomenology represents constructions of the tourism experience that were shared across a variety of tourists, and thus represented salient themes that help to organize the international tourism experience and outcomes. International tourists (informants) who had recently returned from a country they had not previously visited were interviewed using an unstructured approach. Constructions provided during these interviews were analyzed to determine those that were shared amongst respondents, those that were uniquely held, and the contextual conditions that surrounded them. The shared themes, meanings and patterns that shaped the informants" travels suggested that a dominant "story line" of the international travel experience is that of self- discovery--discovery of the individual, cultural, and global "self". It was further suggested that the experience of international tourism is shaped by two distinct themes: (1) negotiation within the host culture and (2) tension associated with the tourism role. Associated with these themes were three types of intercultural experiences: signature, portal, and reflective experiences. Because no empirically grounded phenomenology of the international tourism experience has been reported in the literature, this study provides an important foundation for an ongoing agenda of tourism research. |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: Recreation and Resources Development". |
| Physical Description: | xii, 187 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilms Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references: pages 166-175. |