http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
a phenomenology of the international travel experience
xii, 187 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm.
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
"Major Subject: Recreation and Resources Development".
Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilms Inc.
Includes bibliographical references: pages 166-175.
Major recreation and resources development