Tourist stereotypes from the resident perspective : implicit and explicit assessments, emotional reactions and behavioural responses

Abstract

Stereotyping reflects the beliefs or expectations of an individual perceived by members of another social group. Tourist stereotyping is a type of stereotyping that has been a frequent and long-lasting practice of hosting residents towards particular groups of tourists. In recent years, the expansion of Chinese outbound tourism has concentrated tourist stereotyping on them. The Chinese are often stereotyped with negative labels, such as being impolite, pushy, unbridled and abominable, as a result of bizarre incidents and complaints from hosting residents. Correspondingly, hosting residents respond through their actions. For instance, name-calling discrimination using 'locusts' against Mainland Chinese tourists has been observed in Hong Kong, and Chinese characters have been identified at the Louvre Museum in Paris that warn the Chinese not to urinate and defecate in the premises. The social dynamics between Mainland Chinese tourists and hosting residents provide an opportunity to investigate the connectivity amongst stereotypes, emotions and behaviours. The primary purpose of this thesis is to understand the interrelationship of residents' attitudes in terms of tourist stereotype, emotional reactions and behavioural responses towards Mainland Chinese tourists, one of the most influential tourism markets, in the context of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. To achieve this goal, four research objectives are formulated: (1) to measure explicit and implicit tourist stereotypes, (2) to examine the relationship between explicit and implicit stereotypes, (3) to develop a scale measuring residents behavioural responses to tourist, and (4) to explore the relationship amongst the tourist stereotypes, emotional reactions and behavioural responses of the residents of selected destinations. Results of this thesis will provide an in-depth and structured understanding of the relationships amongst the tourist stereotypes, emotional reactions and behavioural responses of residents and potentially offer destination management organisations (DMOs) and tourism officials insights that are relevant in identifying, prioritising and managing host-guest relationship for sustainable tourism development. Existing tourism studies focusing on stereotypes have explored a single stream of stereotypes, namely, explicit stereotypes. However, stereotypes are dichotomous systems that distinguish between explicit and implicit stereotypes. The sole measurement of explicit stereotypes can result in the manipulation of results with self-presentational effects of social desirability. Hence, the current findings can be inconclusive. Implicit stereotypes are captured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) with detailed mapping to the associated stereotype category using selection criteria. The IAT can serve as a template for future replication and diffusion of stereotype studies and thus contributes methodologically to the academic and industry fields of tourism. Furthermore, the relationship analysis between explicit and implicit stereotypes validates the dichotomous systems in stereotypes, which also applies in the tourism context when measuring tourist stereotypes. Existing tourism studies have focused only on the dichotomous view instead of a multifaceted perspective. Thus, this study develops a resident behaviour model to map the behaviours of locals who are for or against tourists to two discerning dimensions of valence and intensity. Valence considers behaviours along the facilitative-harm spectrum, whereas intensity discerns the behaviours along the active-passive spectrum. Twelve behavioural items are identified with four quadrants: residents' initiatives that can benefit tourists (active-facilitation), residents' accommodative behaviours towards tourists (passive-facilitation), residents' intimidation of tourists (active-harm) and residents distancing away from tourists in need (passive-harm). These items are summarised from existing tourism studies and undergo exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to form a structured model. This model strengthens the conceptualisation of residents' behavioural responses in the tourism literature and aids in developing management strategies for managing host-guest relationship. Tourist stereotypes, emotional reactions and behavioural responses form the overall conceptual framework of this thesis, and they are measured using contemporary models of tourist stereotype model (Tung, King, & Tse, 2020), emotions from stereotype content model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) and the developed resident behaviour model, respectively. Hypotheses are developed to measure the direct relationships amongst tourist stereotypes, emotional reactions and behavioural responses and eventually the mediating effect of emotional reactions on tourist stereotypes and behavioural responses. These relationships are analysed with SPSS Process v3.3, and 13 significant mediating effects of emotional reactions on tourist stereotypes and behavioural responses are identified. Results offer an initial modelling of the interrelationships amongst the three constructs in the tourism context. Furthermore, they identify the interrelationships of each dimension of tourist stereotypes on the predictions on the type of emotional reactions and quadrant of behavioural responses. In this thesis, the four proposed objectives are achieved by adopting a quantitative research of survey approach. More specifically, it is an online questionnaire consists of an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Likert scale rating on the measurements items of Tourist Stereotype Model (Tung et al., 2020), Emotions from Stereotype Content Model (Fiske et al., 2002) and the developed Resident Behaviour Model. IAT captures the reaction time of each tourist and tourist stereotype association and calculate the D score, reflecting the stereotype category. Tourist Stereotype Model and Emotions from Stereotype Content Model shard the same Likert scale where 1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree. Resident Behaviour Model adopts a Likert scale where 1 = Never to 7 = Often. The collect data are analyzed with IBM SPSS 25.0 and SPSS PROCESS v3.3 in terms of implicit stereotype categorizations, frequency analysis, Pearson's correlation, Factor Analysis, and hypotheses testing with respect to the four research objective accordingly. Overall, this thesis contributes to the tourism academic and offers insights to DMOs and tourism officials. Firstly, it validates the applicability of the IAT in measuring tourist stereotypes, offering a new methodological approach for tourism studies and an online public access platform to capture individuals' implicit cognition. Secondly, findings of this thesis indicate discrepancies between explicit and implicit tourist stereotypes, which support the concept of dichotomous systems of stereotypes in the tourism context. Hence, the existing tourism literature and public opinion adopting either measurement approach will result in an incomplete judgment that leads to incorrect policy formations. Thirdly, the development of the resident behaviour model strengthens the conceptualisation of intergroup behaviours from a spectrum of avoidance approach to a multifaceted framework. The model also presents specific resident behaviours for DMOs and tourism officials to understand residents' responses to tourists. Finally, the integration of tourist stereotypes, emotional reactions and behavioural responses serves as an initial modelling that promotes knowledge enhancement for understanding the social dynamics of resident attitude in tourism. Furthermore, this model can provide insights into predicting discriminatory behaviours from tourist stereotypes, allowing the prioritisation of government efforts to manage the host-guest relationship for sustainable tourism development.