CONSTRUCTION OF THE INDICATORS OF AUTHENTICITY PERCEPTION IN ANCIENT VILLAGE AND EVALUATION——Based on the Empirical Data of Ancient Villages in Southern Anhui
XU Wei1,2, LI Yao2
1. School of Business Administration, Anhui University of Finance and Economics, Bengbu 233030, China;
2. School of International Business Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai 200433, China
Abstract Tourism authenticity has become the hot topic in tourism scholars' discussion and academic research, but only few domestic scholars have done the research on the authenticity of the ancient village. The ancient village is the original form of human gathering, production, reproduction, and life. So this paper aims to develop and validate the tourist-based authenticity perception scale. First, this paper describes the characteristics of the ancient village from the prospective of broad culture, and discusses the relationship between its culture and authenticity. Second, on the basis of some authenticity literature review and some empirical research on several ancient villages in southern Anhui, this paper defines the tourist-based tourism authenticity, and establishes the raw evaluation indicators of tourism authenticity perception from the perspective of material, system, behavior, and attitude culture. Third, we delete the invalid items with the help of tourism experts and scholars. Fourth, through the further exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis by the software Lisrel8.7, this paper classifies tourism authenticity into four categories. And it is identified that the scale to measure the authenticity perception of ancient village is reliable and valid. Furthermore, some previous research suggests that authenticity depends on tourist subject and/or tourism object, and there have been some definitions of authenticity. Finally, this paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of the study in order to help the ancient villages to enhance their key competitiveness, such as developing and validating the authenticity perception scale which could contribute to the further study, looking into the authenticity indicators in depth, clearing the dominant status of the originality, designing and developing the authentic tourism resources depending on the authenticity classification through multi-channels.
2012, Vol. 27 
