Serious tourists or casual tourists? Development and validation of a scale to measure tourists’ serious/casual participation

ABSTRACT

Past research indicated that understanding tourist participation could assist in predicting tourists’ psychological and behavioural outcomes. However, few studies have explored tourist participation from the perspectives of serious and casual participation. By extending theories of serious and casual leisure, this research confirmed that tourist participation in tourism activities varies along double independent continuous scales including serious and casual participation, and developed a serious/casual participation scale (SCPS) to assess tourist participation. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, two tourist samples were collected to validate a hierarchical model of the SCPS, with two overarching second-order factors including both serious and casual participation items. The results showed that the SCPS had good fit, reliability, and validity. The findings provide ways to segment tourist markets based on tourist participation, and further expand academically the current knowledge of serious and casual participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist participation characteristics
• serious leisure
• casual leisure
• market segments
• scale development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (R.O.C.) [grant number NSC101-2410-H-415-040 and MOST-103-2410-H-415-037-SSS].