Research On Resident’s Construction Of Place Meaning In The Tourism Festival

Experience and meaning attached to it is the core of festival research.Nowadays,researchers have focused on experience and meaning of tourists,and neglected that of residents.Residents’ place meanings in tourism festival are meanings assigned to the place by the interaction of residents with other people or environment in the place,and develop with the interaction.It is important for the managers of festival and city to understand the place meaning constructed by residents in the festival for that it can predict the attitudes and behaviors of residents,purposely design festival products,manage conflicts among different stakeholders,and ultimately achieve sustainability of tourism festival in the destination.The study starts with combing tourism festivals industry and the participation of residents in practice,makes a review of place meaning and influence of festival at home and abroad,and points out that the research on place meaning in tourism festival is scarce Then,based on sensemaking and self-determination theory,this study puts forward questions as below: 1.What are the place meanings constructed by residents in the context of festival? 2.What are the essential elements of the construction of place meaning? 3.what is the process of constructing place meanings? 4.Why do different groups construct different place meanings?In order to answer these questions,this study takes the Peony Cultural Festival Luoyang,China(the PCFLC)as an example,and adopts a mixed research method of qualitative research followed by quantitative research.In qualitative study,the study uses single-case study,in-depth interview,participant observation and other methods to collect data on how residents construct place meanings in the PCFLC,encodes and constructs models for the content,process,and essential elements of place meaning through grounded analysis.Secondly,the research sorts the construction of place meaning into different kinds of groups,and verifies the principles by continuous comparison of residents’ narratives.Quantitative research is carried out on the basis of qualitative research,especially the scale of place meaning constructed in tourism festival.The quantitative research verifies the relationship among perceived context,motivation and place meaning of residents through structural equation model.Finally,the following conclusions are drawn on as below:1.The place meanings of residents in the PCFLC consist of four parts: self-identity,self-development,leisure and economic dependence.They can be divided into two categories:functions and values.The former includes leisure and economic dependence,while the later includes self-development and self-identity.Of which,self-development and leisure have never been referred to in other research of place meaning constructed in festivals.2.Other than place meaning,the essential elements used in constructing residents’ place meaning include perceived context,actions and emotions.Among them,perceived context is the basis for the construction of place meaning,and the characteristic of perceived context is that it is different from previous context.Action is the key to the process,which is mainly about motivation and participating manners.Functions and values are the results of the process,which are relatively stable parts in constructing place meaning.Emotion is the factor influencing it.3.The process of constructing place meaning in tourism festivals includes three stages:inciting-responding-introspecting,and the evolution of place meaning is a spiral of these stages.Among them,the inciting stage includes facing with the shocks and extracting the differences,the responding stage includes choosing identity and reacting,the introspecting stage includes evaluating outcome and reflecting on oneself.4.Sensemaking is a part of the construction of place meaning.The philosophical foundation and research layer of "sense" in sensemaking and "meaning" in construction of place meaning is not completely the same.Sensemaking takes an important role in the construction of place meaning and provides a theoretical basis for the construction of place meaning.The introspection is about forming evaluation and condensing cognition about oneself.5.There are different types of the construction of place meaning.The research shows that the construction of place meaning can be divided into four types,namely,deep,pluralistic,limited,and sporadic construction of place meaning.The principles of division are as follows:the degree of shock residents faced in the festivals,self-relevance with the PCFLC,and the motivation to participate in festivals.6.Self-determination theory can be used in the construction of place meaning.It is proved that motivation can play a mediating role in the relationship between perceived context and place meaning,and sex and working for the PCFLC or not can moderate the relationship of perceived context,motivation and place meaning.