Understanding dark tourism rituality (DTR): scale development and validation

ABSTRACT

Dark tourism has long struggled with the moral conundrum of how death and violence can be seen as tourist attractions. However, ‘rituality’ can be considered to answer this conundrum. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study developed a dark tourism rituality scale (DTR Scale) with 12 items in four dimensions: ritual space experience, ritual element experience, ritual participation experience, and ritual significance experience. These dimensions demonstrate the process of dark sites’ transformation from the ‘unacceptable’ to the ‘sacred’. For the first time, this study quantifies the dark tourism process, which constructs its legitimacy and significance through rituality. This study reveals not only the individual dark tourists’ psychological experience, but also the political and economic characteristics of dark tourism rituality, and provides a systematic and measurable theoretical reference for future theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark tourism
• rituality
• scale development
• patriotism
• intention to recommend

Acknowledgements

We thank Peter Fogarty, MA English 1st Class, Liwen Bianji (Edanz) (www.liwenbianji.cn/) for editing the English text of a draft of this manuscript. Jiaojiao Sun: draft writing, qualitative data analysis. Xingyang LV: conceptualisation, quantitative data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42101225]; Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 21YJCZH140, 23YJA630072]; Guanghua Talent Project of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, and ‘Qinglan Project' of Jiangsu Province.