Understanding dark tourism rituality (DTR): scale development and validation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dark tourism has long struggled with the moral conundrum of how death and violence can be seen as tourist attractions. However, ‘rituality’ can be considered to answer this conundrum. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study developed a dark tourism rituality scale (DTR Scale) with 12 items in four dimensions: ritual space experience, ritual element experience, ritual participation experience, and ritual significance experience. These dimensions demonstrate the process of dark sites’ transformation from the ‘unacceptable’ to the ‘sacred’. For the first time, this study quantifies the dark tourism process, which constructs its legitimacy and significance through rituality. This study reveals not only the individual dark tourists’ psychological experience, but also the political and economic characteristics of dark tourism rituality, and provides a systematic and measurable theoretical reference for future theory and practice.