Low Self-Control, the Adventurer Personality, and Victimization: A Tourism Evaluation

ABSTRACT

There is a dearth of research examining criminal victimization among tourists and travelers. Additionally, with the exception of the routine activities framework, none of the leading criminological perspectives have been applied to study tourism victimization. In this paper, we apply a dominant criminological perspective, self-control theory, and an emerging perspective on tourist personality inventory, the Jackson Tourist Personality Inventory, to examine risks of victimization among a sample of tourists. We also assess whether the adventurer tourist personality inventory influences risks of victimization beyond an individual’s self-control. Employing three categories of victimization – personal victimization, property victimization, and other victimization – we found low self-control predicted two types of victimization (property victimization and other victimization) while the adventurer tourist personality type was a significant predictor of one type of victimization (property victimization). We also uncovered that the characteristics of an adventurer tourist were not related to victimization risks after a tourist’s self-control has been taken into consideration. Finally, we found that under conditions of very low self-control, the adventurer tourist measure was related to property victimization. Theoretical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-control
• tourist victimization
• adventurer personality
• jackson tourist personality inventory
• spuriousness thesis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. To be sure, there is a wider set of studies that examine the crime/victimization risks around tourist-type locations, such as sporting arenas (Piquero et al., 2021; Kurland & Piza, 2018) and tourist theme parks (Han et al., 2019). This line of research however, does not focus on individual risk factors, which our study is centered upon.

2. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (STUDY000916) at the first author’s institution.

3. Because the research team contracted Qualtrics to recruit participants for the study, we do not have any information concerning the response rate.

4. Prior research on victimization tends to focus on personal and property crimes. Hence, we created the measures of Personal Victimization and Property Victimization for our study. Further, given the evidence that tourists often encounter verbal assault, sex and drug solicitation, and trader harassment (Boakye, 2010; McElroy et al., 2007; Nicely, 2020), we created the measure of Other Victimization and included them.

5. We did not include the Cronbach alphas for our dependent measures because alpha is generally calculated for multiple-item scales (i.e., a twelve-item measure of self-control) and is typically not performed for a count or index, especially one that only has a few values as is the case in our current study (Streiner, 2003). We do report the results of factor analyses. Results from the principal component exploratory reveal all the items for each outcome measure in our study loaded on a single factor with all loadings were > 0.30. Further, there is both face validity with the items covered in the victimization measures as well as construct validity with respect to how the key variables relate to victimization.

6. The VIFs and tolerances for all of the variables are shown in Table 1. According to the results, all VIFs are below 4 and all tolerances are above 0.25, indicating that multicollinearity is not a problem with our data.

7. We excluded the other demographic variables (sex, race, education level, and household income) because they did not predict the outcome variables in the previous logistic models and to adhere to the recommended SPV (number of subjects per variable) of 10:1.