치유의 숲을 이용한 중장년층의 성공적 노화 인식과 치유관광 행동의도 간의 관계에 관한 연구

Abstract

Middle-aged people in their 40s and older are found to be primary visitors of healing forests in South Korea. The present study sought to identify the relationship between the awareness of successful aging of middle aged healing forests visitors and their behavioral intention of healing tourism. Using systemic sampling method, data for this study was collected from the Bongsan Healing Forest visitors in their 40s to 65, and a final sample of 312 was used for the data analysis. We found that the more the participants think daily welling is important in their successful aging, the better they are likely to have positive attitude and perceived control on healing tourism. Results also show that the research participants' awareness of importance on psychological welling in the successful aging is positively associated with their attitude and subjective norm and perceived behavior control of healing tourism. Results also indicated that the healing forest visitors' awareness of importance on the self efficacy in the successful aging is significantly impact on their subjective norms and perceived control on healing tourism. Furthermore, we found that the healing forest visitors attitude and subjective norm of healing tourism were found to be significantly related to their behavior intention of healing tourism. This study contributed to the theoretical expansion of tourism sciences by introducing the conceptual framework of successful aging that is relatively new in the field of tourism sciences and has been mostly studies in other fields such as gerontology, nursing, and physical education.