Social inclusion and subjective well-being of tourism entrepreneurial migrants: mobility patterns as moderators

ABSTRACT

Despite growing interest in various groups of tourism-led migrants, limited research has concerned whether and how social inclusion contributes to tourism entrepreneurial migrants’ lives. This study explores the dimension of social inclusion and its effect on tourism entrepreneurial migrants’ subjective well-being and further tests the moderating effects of mobility patterns. The main effects were analyzed with structural equation models and the moderation effect was tested via multigroup analysis, respectively using 298 and 157 samples from China’s Lijiang and Dali heritage cities. Results confirmed the significant role of migrants’ motivation in their social inclusion and revealed several significant impacts of such inclusion on their subjective well-being. Moreover, mobility patterns moderated linkages between the above constructs in certain model relationships. These findings enrich the knowledge of tourism entrepreneurial migrants and offer practical implications for destinations.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism entrepreneurial migrant
• subjective well-being (SWB)
• social inclusion
• mobility pattern
• lifestyle migration
• small tourism enterprise (STE)

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the helpful comments by Prof. Takkee Hui and Huimin Song, and particular thank Dr. Yiyi Lu and Jia Li for help in filed investigation and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences of China [grant number 19BGL148].