Factor Components And Differences Of Dark Tourism Constraints

With the development of economy and the progress of human society,tourism has become an indispensable activity in people's daily life in the 21 st century.With the increase in the number of tourists,the individual needs of tourists are increasingly diversified.Dark tourism,which has profound connotations and enables people to obtain special experiences,gradually enters the human's travel world.Since the rise of dark tourism in Europe and America in 1990 s,due to its unique attraction,it has been loved and sought after by many foreign tourists,and has become a hot research field in the western academia because of its contradictions between life and death,beauty and ugliness,leisure and fear,morality and commerce.In 2008,a huge earthquake occurred in Wenchuan,Sichuan Province.Then,the earthquake site tourism rose in China,and the development of dark tourism has also received widespread attention from domestic scholars.However,due to the constraints of traditional Chinese culture and the development of tourism industry,the development of dark tourism in China has been limited.How to clearly understand the constraints of individuals' participation in dark tourism and to find ways to mitigate or reduce these constraints is an important issue to ensure the health and sustainable development of dark tourism in China.On the basis of the foreign leisure constraint scale,this study revises and constructs the measurement index system for the dark tourism constraint of the Beichuan earthquake site.Using the method of questionnaire survey,SPSS22.0 software was used to deal with the data.Through descriptive statistics,exploratory factor analysis,independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA,the composition and dimension of the dark tourism constraint of Beichuan earthquake site were discussed,and the discrepancy of individual's constraint on dark tourism between the different demographic characteristics and different past experiences were analyzed.The study found that:(1)The constraint factors of dark tourism in Beichuan earthquake site consist of three dimensions: "emotion and escape","cognition and experience" and "objective factors".Under the “emotion and escape” dimension,there are eight constraint factors,including depression,sadness,tragic,painful,horrible,depressed,unwilling to face,and more inclined to pleasant/happy area.The “cognition and experience” dimension mainly includes five constraints: interest,risk perception,cultural cognition,past travel experience,and suggestions from friends and family.The “objective factors” dimension includes five external reasons such as distance,time,traffic,information and companions.(2)From the overall dimension,the influence of the dark tourism constraint factors of the Beichuan earthquake site on respondents was stratified by the order of “cognition and experience” constraint,“emotional and escape” constraint,and “objective factors” constraint.From the single constraint factor,the most influential factors are “I am more inclined to go to some places that make people feel pleasant”,“I'm afraid I'll be depressed after the visit,” “I'm afraid I'll be sad after the visit”.It can be seen that dark tourism may produce negative emotional experience,which is one of the most important reasons to hinder or restrict the participation of respondents in dark tourism.(3)From the analysis of different dark tourism constraints between different demographic characteristics of respondents,it can be seen that: In the dimension of "emotion and escape",there are significant differences among the respondents of different sex,age and regions.In the “cognition and experience” dimension,there are significant differences between respondents with different levels of education and from different regions.In the "objective factors" dimension,there are significant differences between respondents of different genders,ages,occupations,levels of education,and regions.(4)According to the analysis of different previous experience respondents,the respondents who have not participated in the dark tourism are significantly more affected by the most constraint factors than those who participated in dark tourism.There was only a few number of constraint factors have significant differences in the respondents who had not experienced the earthquake compared with those who had experienced the earthquake.Finally,according to the existing constraint factors and the characteristics of different groups' dark tourism constraint,the author proposes countermeasures and suggestions for promoting the sustainable development of Beichuan earthquake site in dark tourism from the two aspects of concept and practice.