해양레저스포츠 체험공간의 속성이 참가자의 감정적 반응, 만족, 재참가의도에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The powerfully attractive force of water resources in tourist decision making has been well documented and an enormous amount of tourism occurs in coastal areas. The mystical attraction of the waterfront continues to grow and the growing increase in income and spare time has driven more people turn to marine leisure sports as a way to enrich their lives. In reality, tourism is getting more dominated by customized experiences available and destinations are making greater efforts to respond to tourists' specific interests and needs by providing adequate products and services. On the other hand, research has been increasing on marine tourism including marine leisure sports, but it has dealt mainly with policy implications for development on the macro level. Few have addressed consumer behavior in participants in marine leisure sports. Leisure experience includes interactions with others and the environment and interactions during leisure are known to influence the experience. Given the hedonic nature of leisure, emotions that arise during and post product/service consumption are important influences on the actions of consumers. However, very little research in marine tourism literature has explored the relationships that may exist between the constructs of emotions, satisfaction and revisit intentions among the participants in marine leisure sports. Therefore, this study intended to identify the attributes of marine leisure sports sites, investigate the relationships among such attributes, participants' emotional responses, satisfaction, and revisit intentions, and to suggest an integrated model of the concepts with the support of empirical evidence. This paper was conducted based on the following methods and guidelines. First, based on a review of the literature on marine leisure sports, tourism, leisure, consumer behavior, factors such as physical attributes, service, accessibility, and perceived risk were selected as salient attributes that represent the marine leisure sport destination. And based on the literature, generated were the hypotheses and research models that could evaluate the causal relationship among antecedent variables, emotion variables and variables for satisfaction and revisit intentions. Second, measurement items on the questionnaire were developed both from the integration of expert consultation and literature review. After a refinement of the items in a pretest, survey was conducted with participants in marine leisure sports at the three sites in Busan, Korea from March 17 through May 13, 2007. A total of 450 close-ended questionnaires were distributed and 387 valid responses were used for the analysis of this study. Third, exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis were carried out to evaluate the conceptual validity and internal coherence of antecedent variables, positive emotion, negative emotion, satisfaction, and revisit intentions. The findings of Cronbach's Alpha were all higher than 0.7 and thus validated the research design. Results from the analysis proved uni-dimensionality for all constructs. The results of reliability analyses were acceptable and confirmatory factor analysis, conducted for purifying variables, validated the adequacy of measurement tools used in the research design. Fourth, structural equation model(SEM) was used to confirm the adequacy of the proposed research model. It was found that χ² = 761.947, GFI = 0.864, AGFI = 0.825, RMR = 0.079, NFI = 0.904, RFI = 0.887, IFI=0.931, CFI = 0.931. Therefore, the model proved adequate as suitability was confirmed for all indices. Fifth, based on the analysis results above, research hypotheses were tested. The following are the research outputs. First, in the relationships between antecedent variables and emotional responses, physical attributes and perceived risk were found to influence significantly both positive and negative emotions. However, accessibility and service were found to influence significantly neither positive nor negative emotion. This seems to be attributable to the fact that the survey was conducted at an off-peak period and more than half of the respondents were local residents. Second, both positive emotion and negative emotion were found to influence significantly satisfaction and revisit intentions. As a result, the mediating role of emotional responses were verified. From the findings from the research, the following were proposed to be necessary to stimulate the participant's emotional experience with the goal of maximizing satisfaction: establishment of a specific destination image through promotion, guarantee of safety and security, establishment of information system. It is expected that this study, which has studied consumer behaviors of marine leisure sports participants, will contribute to understanding what contributes to customers' satisfaction and revisit intentions. In addition, it will stimulate further research for the development of marketing efforts for the effective management in marine leisure sports destinations.