Perceived attractiveness and dimensionality of culture-based tourism opportunities for Prophetstown
Abstract
The focus of this research was twofold. A primary goal was to investigate the perceived attractiveness of a series of tourism opportunities proposed for Prophetstown, a 19th century Shawnee town in central Indiana with ties to Native American and U.S. military history in the Wabash Valley and the Old Northwest Territory to determine which activities would be the most appealing to culturally-minded travelers. The process involved identifying the range of the site's cultural assets with a proposed framework that facilitated the comparison of two different breakdowns of culture, one by the field of foundational field of anthropology and the other by UNESCO, transforming them into potential tourism activities and pre-testing their attractiveness among consumers before implementation. A secondary goal was to investigate the dimensionality of the proposed tourism opportunities for Prophetstown, while at the same time, validating the usefulness of the proposed framework in helping to identify and organize the site's cultural assets. A total of 285 valid surveys were collected at Mississinewa 1812, a central Indiana fall festival, which included perceived attractiveness scores for 48 culture-based tourism opportunities or activities and other key variables. Perceived attractiveness scores were used to analyze the dimensionality of the proposed culture-based activities with exploratory factor analysis in SPSS 16.0. The resultant underlying seven-factor latent structure, which included all four factors from the proposed framework, was verified with confirmatory factory analysis in Amos 16.0. Using a respondent's emotional involvement with culture as the exogenous variable and perceived attractiveness scores as endogenous variables for structural equation modeling (SEM), an unexpected result was the presence of conceptual linkages between passive and active elements within the latent structure, which can envisioned as a double binary pattern: tangible/intangible and passive/active. Additionally, emotional involvement with culture had a positive and significant relation with perceived attractiveness, and thus, the results of this research can be used to guide development that will appeal to culturally-engaged tourists. Using the top ten most attractive tourism opportunities as the main guide, key recommendations included the introduction of culinary tourism combined with storytelling or folktales at Prophetstown. This recommendation stood true across all demographic groups including age, gender, education, as well as level of emotional and behavioral involvement with culture. Additionally, since seven of the top ten tourism opportunities were drawn from the realm of intangible culture, this area should be considered important for identifying other tourism opportunities. Finally, insights were garnered from taking a closer look at the top-ranked tourism opportunities segmented by gender, age and education, which can be used to guide future tourism development for targeted segments of the population.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Lehto, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Cultural anthropology|American history|Management|Native American studies
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