Hit close to home: the moderating effects of past experiences on tourists’ on-site experiences and behavioral intention in post-earthquake site

ABSTRACT

Echoing calls for further empirical research of exploring complex mechanism of dark tourism experiences, as well as following the series of studies on post-disaster recovery (Wenchuan earthquake in China), it takes an earthquake-ruined country town Beichuan as a study case to explore relationships between dark places, on-site experiences, and behavioral intentions. By using structural equation modeling, it proves that the framework of aroused memory, cognition-affection, satisfaction, and behavior intention (place protection) is an effective new approach to understand visitors’ psychological experiences in the contest of dark tourism. Most importantly, it innovatively proves in quantitative way that aroused memory (either firsthand or secondhand) is the antecedent factor that influences the on-site cognition and emotion, and past experience plays the moderating role affects both the extent and the inner relation of dark experiences between visitors who were exposed/not exposed to a specific dark event. The findings are also beneficial in guiding post-disaster site planning and management.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark tourism
• cognitive–affective experience
• memory
• protection intention
• structural equation model
• moderating effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in China Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities for supporting our research through Humanities and Social Sciences Project [grant number 17YJC790209]; the National Tourism Administration Youth Tourism Expert Training Project [grant number TYETP201525]; National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)[grant number 41571136 and 41171121].