Giving Over Taking/Receiving in Volunteer Tourism. The impact of motivation, attitude, and subjective norm on stage of readiness and its implication on social marketing

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of motivation, attitude, and subjective norm on stage of readiness to be involved in volunteer tourism and its implication on social marketing. Volunteer tourism is a tourism product that combines volunteerism and tourism activities in a destination and commonly offered by an international volunteer organisation. In this study the author examine the influence of motivation, subjective norm, and attitude towards volunteer tourism concept on stage of readiness to be involved in volunteer tourism. Motivation is treated as two different variables – taking/receiving and giving motivations. Taking/receiving represents self-interest whereas giving represents altruism. Separating motivation into taking/receiving and giving has rarely done by prior researchers, particularly in a quantitative approach. To gather data, an online survey was conducted attracting 268 male and 274 female participants across nations. In total there were eight hypotheses to be tested. There is a limited sources applying stage of readiness in the study of volunteer tourism. In the tourism literature, stage of readiness relates to a readiness of a person to participate in a tourism product and commonly links to low and high involvement types of activities. Based on the confirmatory factor analysis, all eight hypotheses are accepted. The findings carry out innovations: firstly, the participants might be involved in volunteer tourism were more influenced by giving motivation rather than taking/receiving motivation. The implication of these findings can be a reason why social marketing is more suitable to promote a volunteer tourism project instead of using a commercial marketing approach. Secondly, variables, such as attitude, subjective norm, taking/receiving motivation, and giving motivation can predict stage of readiness. Recommendations for practitioners and future research are discussed. Keywords—volunteer tourism; taking/receiving and giving (TRG) motivations; attitude; subjective norm; stage of readinesscomponent;