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| IMPACTS OF TOURISTS' INVOLVEMENT ON PLACE ATTACHMENT IN CULTURAL TOURIST ATTRACTIONS |
| WANG Kun1, HUANG Zhen-fang2, FANG Ye-lin2, ZHANG Hong-xia1 |
1. College of History Culture and Tourism, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou 221116, China;
2. College of Geographic Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210046, China |
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Abstract People's emotional attachment to a particular place is an objective phenomenon of man-land relationship. As the core of man-land relationship, place attachment has always been the focus of tourism geography research abroad. This paper investigates the impacts of tourists' involvement in place attachment in the dimension hierarchy in cultural tourist attractions. The dimensions of tourists' involvement and place attachment are revised by previous researchers. Tourists' involvement scale includes three dimensions:importance/symbolic, entertainment and risk, which revises Mcintyre & Pigram's study on recreation involvement. Structural questionnaires are applied in the data collection process, and a 17-item scale for three-dimensional tourists' involvement and a 8-item scale for two-dimensional place attachment. In this study, a structural equation model is used for theory test and development. The results are shown as follows:(1) Based on the comprehensive analysis of place attachment and tourists' involvement in the past, the paper proposes that the correlation analysis is possible between tourists' involvement and place attachment through the dimension hierarchy. (2) The paper uses AMOS software to test the tourists' involvement measurement model, place attachment measurement model and the total measurement model. As amended, the confirmatory factor analysis of model shows that the model's goodness of fit is well and all fit indices have met the requirements. (3) Seven hypotheses of the conceptual model put forward on this paper are partially supported by the results of path analysis in structural equation model, which shows that for the Han Cultural Tourist Attractions in Xuzhou, tourists' involvement has significant effects on place attachment. (4) At the same time, the relationship between place identity dimension and place dependence dimension of place attachment has been found. Place identity dimension has positive significant effects on place dependence dimension.
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Received: 19 December 2011
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2013, Vol. 28 
