Tourists' perceived safety through emotional solidarity with residents in two Mexico–United States border regions
Kyle M. Woosnam,
C. Scott Shafer,
David Scott and
Dallen J. Timothy
Tourism Management, 2015, vol. 46, issue C, 263-273
Abstract:
Security and safety are extremely important for travelers and the tourism industry. One construct that has remained largely unexplored in explaining visitors' perceived safety while at the destination is their level of emotional solidarity (positive sentiments one feels for another) with destination residents. The purpose of this paper is to examine tourists' perceived safety in two popular tourism destinations in Texas along the Mexico–U.S. border (i.e., the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the Big Bend area) and investigate the extent to which tourists' emotional solidarity with residents predicts their perceptions of safety. Perceptions of safety were higher among visitors to the Big Bend area than they were among visitors to the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Also, visitors high in emotional solidarity (particularly to a dimension pertaining to feeling welcomed) also perceived the tourism destination as relatively safe. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.
Keywords: International borders; Confirmatory factor analysis; Emotional solidarity; Feeling welcomed; Emotional closeness; Sympathetic understanding; Perceived safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517714001241
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:46:y:2015:i:c:p:263-273
DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2014.06.022
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 ().