Research On Tourism Decision-Making In The Psychological Paradigm

Tourism decision-making is a process of which individuals collect and process tourism information according to their tourism intention, put forward and select tourism proposals or plans, and then takes them into effect. This process can be classified into three complementary faculties: tourism decision-making under certainty, tourism decision-making under uncertainty, and risky tourism decision-making. The difference between tourism decision-making under uncertainty and risky tourism decision-making is indistinctive. In fact, these two types of decision-making dori t exist objectively in our true life, the differentiation is based on different levels of the uncertainty supposed.Referring to the previous literature extensively, following the program of process-tracing technique, and using multi-method of psychological research, the purpose of the present research which is based on the demonstrative research, is to explore the processing of tourism decision-making, its determining factors and the self-evaluation made by the decision-maker to the quality of decision-making, to generalize and conclude the basic principle of tourism decision-making in the framework of descriptive theory of decision-making as well. This research focuses mainly on the experienced tourists and tourism activities, because the experienced individual can be real or potential tourist when they make tourism decision. Multi-method such as interviews, survey, and experiments are used to collect and analyze the specific data.In virtue of the interview and survey, this research identifies seven stages in the processes of tourism decision-making: forming tourism need or motivation; collecting the tourism information; selecting the tourism destination; budgeting; selecting the way of tourism; deciding to go out for traveling; actualizing the decision.The results of the questionnaire survey indicate that there are six factors affecting the outcome of tourism decision-making: tourism service, social support, group support, individual psychological factor, individual socioeconomic factor, and otherfactors. Meanwhile, the demographical factors, including tourisf s gender, age, education background, occupation, the average income, the average number of tourism, also affect the process of tourism decision-making.A series of studies show that in the processes of tourism decision-making: (1 information frames affect the outcome of tourism decision-making significantly. Positive information frames make the larger tourism consumption compared with the negative information frames; (2)The credibility of information also had the notable influence on the tourism decision-making, the higher the credibility of information, the more tourist consume; (3)Cognitive styles have no effect on the outcome of tourism decision-making. There is no significant difference between the field-dependent and the field-independent individuals; (4) Negative emotions influence the outcome of decision-making. The subjects experiencing negative emotion spend far less money than the subjects who didn' t experience negative emotions.It is confirmed by questionnaire survey that most of the subjects were satisfied with their tourism gains, so we can conclude that they have positive evaluation about the quality of their decision-making they ve made. The tourism gains mainly include self-development and interaction, understanding the society and nature, acting freely, aesthetic and relaxation. There' re significant differences in tourism gains between different ages or occupations. However, subjects in our study were all satisfied with their tourism decision, the demographical characteristic, such as gender, age, education background, occupation, and the average incomes, don' t affect the degree of tourism decision satisfactory.