Abstract
Purpose The subject of “well-being” has attracted attention from tourism scholars, but differences and misuses in approach have meant that academic contributions and knowledge accumulation to the tourism literature remain relatively little. This paper attempts to clarify the theoretical source of subjective well-being, and critically reflect on the problems existing in the study of well-being when applied to tourism. It is suggested that subjective well-being belongs to the category of “quality of life” and has multiple philosophical foundations and theoretical sources including theories of hedonism, expectation, happiness and various itemised lists of emotions. A hybrid research method is suggested when applying the concept to tourism.
Highlights
The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution and research trend of the concept of subjective well-being (SWB) and critically reviews its use in the tourism literature, and to provide a summary of key issues and research agenda relating to the concept and its application in tourism
It provides a guidance to the various scales used and makes suggestions referring to the use of concepts of SWB when being applied to tourist experiences
The citation rate of this paper provided by Google Scholar exceeds 15,000 at the time of writing (December 2019), and it is one of the most cited papers in this field
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution and research trend of the concept of subjective well-being (SWB) and critically reviews its use in the tourism literature, and to provide a summary of key issues and research agenda relating to the concept and its application in tourism. SWB is the positive attitude and positive feelings produced by individuals through a comparison of actual and ideal living conditions (Diener et al, 1997; Diener, 2000), and it is a subset of positive psychology It includes periods of people’s lives at one moment or period (e.g. one year) formed by an event, creating feelings of life satisfaction, achieving a sense of fulfilment as well as meeting desired levels of work, family, marriage and other associated areas of emotional lives, reactions and evaluations The authentic happiness comprises subjective experience and individual differences as usually mentioned in the hedonism and desire theory of SWB (Sumner, 1996), and uses an alternative indicator – Happiness (Haybron, 2000, 2003).
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