Adolescent's Learning In Family Travel

A family is an important component of travel market.Family travel is beneficial for not only enhancing family harmony,but also facilitating tourists' personal development.However,when it comes to scholarly inquiries situated at the intersection of tourism,leisure and learning,existing research tends to focus on the contexts of educational travel rather than family travel.Especially with the fact that parents highly expect children to learn from travel experience,such learning in family travel needs to be investigated thoroughly.Therefore,aiming to fill the gap revealed from literature review,this study attempts to investigate the process,outcomes and key relational factors of adolescent's learning in family travel in view of previous theoretical and empirical research.This study is designed to gradually explore from the surface to the spot.Firstly,it qualitatively analyzes adolescent's learning outcomes,learning process and influential factors in family travel on account of learning theories and studies on learning in travel.Secondly,it highlights and quantifies learning outcome as the representative variable of learning behavior in family travel.Thirdly,based on"context-behavior-perception" framework proposed in social learning theory,along with the support of family system theory and positive psychology theory,it further reveals the antecedent and subsequent factors of such learning behavior and the mechanism of how these variables are related.Thus,it consists of three sub-studies as following:(1)thematically explores learning in family travel;(2)develops a family travel learning outcome scale,and discusses the influence of demographic characteristics and trip characteristics on learning outcomes respectively;(3)examines the relationships among family function,learning outcomes and tourist well-being.This study opts for middle school students and undergraduates as research participants,and applies a qualitative and quantitative combined approach to understanding learning in family travel.At first,it conducts thematic analysis to comprehend textual data obtained from 39 in-depth interviews.Subsequently,it collects 271 and 792 valid questionnaires separately in pre-test and second survey,and adopts consistency analysis,reliability analysis,validity analysis,ANOVA analysis,common method bias analysis,structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis to process the data.Consequently,the main conclusions of this study are as follows:1.Family travel learning outcomes consist of knowledge,skills and wisdom about family,travel and self.As for learning process,family travellers learn from family members,tour guide,local residents and other tourists through observation,mutual communication and interaction on specific occasions before,during and after the trip.In addition,family travel learning outcomes and process are influenced by three systems,namely family context,travel context and tourist per se.2.The learning outcome scale has good reliability and validity,and reveals four dimensions,namely family awareness,personal skills,destination knowledge and self-reflection.Besides,the ANOVA result suggests that age,grade,family income,family structure,travel companion,travel duration,previous travel experience,destination type,travel pattern and travel frequency are associated with learning outcomes.3.Family cohesion/family adaptability has a positive effect on learning outcomes;family communication negatively moderates the relations between family cohesion and learning outcomes,while positively moderates the relations between family adaptability and learning outcomes;learning outcomes have positive effects on tourist well-being.The findings of this study contribute to enriching the theoretical and empirical research in the field of tourist behavior,learning behavior,family functioning and happiness.Especially,the learning outcome scale developed in this study can provide a valid instrument and theoretical foundation for subsequential quantitative studies on family travel learning behavior.Moreover,the results of this study can not only strengthen social awareness of learning and educational benefits for adolescent with family travel experience,but also in terms of family travel practice,aid in product selection of tourists,product design and marketing management of travel companies,and policy establishment of government.