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| RESEARCH ON THE PREFERENCE MEASURE OF TOURISM DESTINATION IMAGE BY APPROACH OF IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST |
| GU Ying-kang1,2, YANG Jie3 |
1. School of International Business Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai 200433, China;
2. School of Economics and Management, Shanghai Second Polytechnic University, Shanghai 201209, China;
3. School Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China |
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Abstract Tourism destination image has been a focus topic in tourism marketing research for quite a long time since it was introduced into the domain of tourism research in 1970s, for its important role in tourists' destination decision-making, evaluation and word of mouth. This study introduces the implicit association test into the domain of tourism destination image research, where the implicit association test is used to measure the Chinese tourists' implicit perception to Hong Kong (HK) and Korea (KOR) and the traditional questionnaire is used to measure their explicit perception the two destinations. Results show that the participators' explicit perception preference to Hong Kong and Korea is not significant, while their implicit perception preference is significant. As the two most important outbound tourism destinations of China, Hong Kong and Korea are both belonging to developed economies, with plenty of tourism resources, well-equipped tourism facilities, modern and fashionable cultures, as well as their diverse and powerful marketing campaigns to Chinese tourism market, which might lead to this similar explicit perception result by Chinese tourists. However, in the implicit association test process, the participators are asked to respond to the questions given by the Inquisit software as quickly as possible. For not having enough time to have a deep and rational thinking, the participators can only make their response just depending on their first and direct reflection to the given question in all the seven stages during the implicit association test process, to show their implicit perception preference to the two destinations. The final implicit perception data shows that the Chinese tourists prefer Hong Kong to Korea in their deep heart.
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Received: 29 April 2014
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2015, Vol. 30 
