| With the improvement of old people's life and economic conditions,the tourism market for the elderly in China has attracted increasing attention.However,most studies regard the elderly as a single homogeneous consumer market,and have an inadequate understanding of the specificity and complexity of the decision-making strategies,also including the pre-decision of the elderly's tourism.Tourism has the product characteristics of experiential consumption,and decision-making more dependent self,cognitive and situational between the embedded relationship.And compared to young people,the elderly have more abundant life experience and more complicated cognitive characteristics,so the introduction of new theory of exploring the logical relationship between the cognitive features of older people and tourism decisions and the underlying mechanism of this relationship is necessary.Embodied cognition is a new theory of cognitive science and provides a theoretical basis for researchers to deeply understand the embedded and interactive relationship between self,cognition,and situation.From the perspective of embodied cognition,in this paper we applied a mixed research paradigm to conduct a continuous discovery research on the causes and decision-making tactics of the urban elderly in the Yangtze River Delta region,systematically analyzed the complex influence of the psychological cognitive characteristics at the old age stage of the elderly on tourism decision-making,and constructed a theoretical model of the causes and decision-making tactics in the elder people,and main studies focused on the following four aspects:First,from the embodied cognition perspective,the paper constructs a theoretical research framework for decision antecedents and strategies concerning decision-making in senior tourism.Based on the review of the characteristics of characteristics of the consumption of senior citizens,senior tourism and tourism decision theory,the paper theoretically discusses the embodiment,cognition and situation characteristics of decision-making in senior tourism,which lays a theoretical foundation for the research.In combination with the mental process analysis of the decision-making in senior tourism,the paper constructs a theoretical guiding framework of its strategy research,and designs a way of mixed research method.Second,by taking Yangtze River Delta as sample area,the paper collects first-hand qualitative data using an in-depth interview method.Based on the embodied cognitive perspective,the paper conducts interpretive research on decision antecedents and strategies concerning decision-making in senior tourism using a qualitative research method.The conclusions consist in:(1)research results of textual analysis show that decision-making in senior tourism is distinctively characterized by self-and situational awareness,and is closely related to the activity level,decision-making initiative and passivity of senior tourism;(2)The coding technology is applied to explore and form the four situational variables that affect the decision of the elderly,including self-efficacy,family function,values and tourism involvement,and two variables of tourism decision-making strategy,including independent decision-making and authority decision-making;(3)The concept clustering matrix and causal diagram method are applied to draw the cause-and-effect network diagram of the decision-making process,providing a hypothesis basis for explaining the correlation between variables.Third,the theoretical basis of the theory model of tourism decision-making of the elderly is established.The paper studies and analyzes the theoretical relationship between the predecisional cause variables and between strategic variables,provides definitions,proposes hypothesis relationship and constructs a theoretical model between decision antecedents and strategies.Forth,by taking Yangtze River Delta as sample area,a questionnaire survey is conducted to collect the first-hand survey data.After the hypothesis relationship between variables is tested by using structural equation model,the theoretical model is modified.The results of quantitative research confirms that self-efficacy,frugality value and family function of the elderly have a significant predictive effect on the tourism decision-making strategy,and furthermore it is also proved that self-efficacy and family function have a positive influence on the elderly tourism involvement,but the frugality value has a negative influence on the involvement of the elderly tourism.On the other hand,the frugality value has a positive influence on the decision-making authority of the elderly tourism;family function has a positive influence on the decision-making authority of senior tourism,tourism involvement has a positive influence on the self-decision-making of senior tourism,but the tourism involvement has a negative influence on the authority of tourism decision.Above all,the study has well completed the related research object,has successfully integrated the self-awareness and situation cognition features of the elderly into the theoretical framework of tourism decision-making,and effectively breaks through the research bottleneck of the "characterization" of decision-making in senior tourism.The research contributes the following four aspects of innovation:First,the effects of special situation characteristics of decision-making in senior tourism is surveyed and analyzed in this paper.Based on the embodied cognition perspective,the paper probes into the the self-awareness and situation cognition features affecting decision-making in senior tourism,systematically integrates their cognitive variables into the study of tourism decision-making and provides new theoretical support for understanding the characteristics of the senior tourism market.Second,the particularity and complexity of decision antecedents and strategies concerning decision-making in senior tourism is re-found by the study based on qualitative data collection.Through the specific discussion on the interactive relationship between the elderly self-efficacy,family function,value and tourism involvement,the paper proposes the theoretical relationship between the self-situation characteristics of the elderly and the tourism decision-making strategies,and then adopts the quantitative research data to validate the hypothesis and provides empirical evidence for the study of decision-making in senior tourism.Third,the research on the decision-making in senior tourism is further carried on.The paper applies a mixed research paradigm to openly mine the qualitative data of decision-making in senior tourism,construct a new theoretical model,and then adopt the quantitative research to conduct the verification and correction of theoretical model.The conclusion of research deepens the theory content of decision-making in senior tourism.Finally,the study enriches and expands the theoretical its research boundary.Traditionally,the tourism academia reckons the elderly as a homogenous travel population,lacking a guiding theoretical framework including special situations and cognitive features of tourists in systematic research.The paper introduces the embodied theory into the research of decision-making in senior tourism,which organically integrates research findings in three areas:cognitive science,tourism decision-making and senior tourism.The paper not only theoretically makes discussion about the embedded relationship among "cognition","situation" and "tourism decision-making",but also innovatively constructs a theoretical model of decision-making in senior tourism,thus providing a reasonable theoretical foundation for the introduction of appropriate theoretical variables of decision antecedents and decision-making strategy of decision-making in senior tourism.Based on the conclusion,the study also provides some practical implications for tourism enterprises and industry authorities,and puts forward directions and ideas for future research. |
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