Abstract
In recent years there are numerous institutions providing education in tourism sector which increase its importance,because of the need for qualified staff. School of Tourism and Hotel Managements are one of these institutions which provide the highest level of education. Due to the forefront of human element because of tourism sectors' structural caharcteristics the purpose of this study is to evaluate optimism and life satisfaction of the undergraduate tourism and hotel management students. “Optimism Scale” developed by Balci and Yilmaz (2002) was used to measure students’ optimism, and “Life Satisfaction” developed by Diener, Emmons, Larsen and Griffin (1985), translated into Turkish by Koker (1991) was used to measure students’ life satisfaction. Element sampling method was used. The sample involved the students who enrolled at School of Tourism and Hotel Management, Selcuk University in Turkey, during the spring semester of 2010-2011 academic year (n= 479). Results showed that the students scored moderately on satisfaction and highly on optimism. Female students were more optimistic and satisfied than male students and the higher the level of income students had, the more optimistic and satisfied they were. Another result showed that there was a positive correlation between students’ optimism and life satisfaction.
Highlights
Humans react differently when they come across with different situations in their daily lives
Due to the forefront of human element because of tourism sectors' structural caharcteristics the purpose of this study is to evaluate optimism and life satisfaction of the undergraduate tourism and hotel management students
Employees in the tourism sector should be at the highest level in terms of both personality development and professional development
Summary
Humans react differently when they come across with different situations in their daily lives. There lie individual differences and perception types underneath this difference (Freedman, Sears and Carlsmith, 1989) These ways of perception turn into behavioristic rituals (Kağıtçıbaşı, 1992). One of these is that an individual adopts an optimistic attitude against these events and situations (Kızılçelik, 1992). Optimism is a term, which involves feelings, expectations, planning, logic and actions (Balcı and Yılmaz, 2002; Gençoğlu, 2006). In this sense, optimism is both an emotion (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger and Vohs, 2003) and a feature, which can be developed by learning processes (Greenwald and Farnham, 2000). Optimist tendency usually refers to the situation in which the individuals are expecting that good things will happen besides the bad ones in the future, and the optimist situation refers to the situation in which individuals choose to be good even under special and limited circumstances (Daco, 1989)
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