여행경력 재개념화에 관한 연구

Abstract

Since Pearce (1988) first suggested the concept of travel career in the tourism field, various research has been conducted, mainly focused on travelers’ psychological and behavioral changes induced by different travel careers. However, the effect and influence of travel careers varied across studies, indicating that the concept has yet to achieve a systematic and valid theory structure (Ko, 2018). More specifically, the limits of previous research are: 1) inconsistency of travel career 2) There is no discussion of subelements. 3) evaluating a travel career solely on the basis of “behavior” and “affect.” Therefore, it is important to draw an integrated conceptual model of a travel career and expand the discussion on subelements. In the field of leisure science, the level of participation in leisure activities is explained by the recreation specialization theory. Previous research has found that travel experience encompasses a variety of leisure behavior characteristics, and that theoretical structure on leisure phenomena provides a significant lead to understanding the characteristics of travel experience (Ko, 2017). On the basis of such a theoretical background, this study applies recreation specialization theory to the conceptualization of travel careers. The main significance of this study is that, while the concept of travel career lacked consistency and subelements, it considered problems drawn from prior studies and developed a systematically complemented measurement tool. Also, with the application of recreation specialization theory, a travel career was constructed with multiple dimensions, including subelements of behavior, cognition, and affect. In particular, the cognitive dimension was scarcely discussed in prior research and it made a contribution to the expansion of the theoretical structure of the travel career concept.