EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Older adults’ parasocial interaction formation process in the context of travel websites: The moderating role of parent-child geographic proximity

Insin Kim and Joonhyeong Joseph Kim

Tourism Management, 2017, vol. 63, issue C, 399-416

Abstract: This study aims to identify the effects of age identity and innovativeness on parasocial interaction (PSI), and the moderating effect of parent-children proximity between age identity and PSI, and to examine the causal relationships between PSI, well-being and word-of-mouth (WOM). A sample of 271 U.S. residents aged 50 and older were recruited through an online survey company. The conceptual model was developed and tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The results found that psychological and physical age have positive effects on PSI, whereas social age has a negative one. Importantly, innovativeness had a negative impact on PSI regardless of the age identity. The psychological and social age induced PSI to a stronger extent when the children lived out of state. Finally, PSI was found to lead to well-being and WOM, whilst well-being itself had a positive effect on WOM. The managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: Parasocial interaction (PSI); Older adults; Age identity; Innovativeness; Well-being; Word-of-mouth (WOM) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517717301632

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:touman:v:63:y:2017:i:c:p:399-416

DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2017.07.012

Access Statistics for this article

Tourism Management is currently edited by Chris Ryan

More articles in Tourism Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:touman:v:63:y:2017:i:c:p:399-416