Revisiting The Mindfulness Framework In Heritage Tourism
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Date
2017-08
Authors
Tan, Poh Ling
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
It has been propounded that mindful tourists are able to appreciate and act
responsibly at heritage sites, as compared to tourists who are mindless. The
mindfulness framework suggested by Moscardo (1996, 1999) has been acknowledged
as important, however, there are few gaps in the application: lack of explanation on
Visitor Factor in influencing mindfulness and lack of specific measure of mindfulness
and interpretive outcome in tourism context. The overall research objective of this
study is to enhance the mindfulness framework in explaining tourist interpretative
outcome. This research examine the influence of Visitor Factors and Communication
Factors on mindfulness. This research is conducted in Penang, a destination listed
under the UNESCO World Heritage. A self-administered questionnaire using quota
sampling method with 390 usable responses from local and international tourists were
gathered. Partial Least Square (PLS) was employed for data analyses: measurement
and structural model assessment. From the analysis, all the constructs have composite
reliability value of more than 0.7 and have demonstrated adequate convergent and
discriminant validity with an average variance extracted value greater than 0.5. The
proposed model of mindfulness has a high level of Goodness of Fit (GoF), with a value
of 0.606. The overall framework shows a strong explanatory power with R2 of 0.628
(62.8%). The results from Q2 tests suggest that interpretive outcome is well predicted
by the model. The findings reveal that mindfulness mediates the relationship between
Uses of Questions (Communication Factors), Level of Interest and Visualisation
(Visitor Factors) and interpretive outcome. This has demonstrated that, in the context
of heritage tourism, only these three variables are significant in influencing
mindfulness in supporting desirable interpretive outcome.
Description
Keywords
Revisiting the mindfulness framework , in heritage tourism