旅游者恢复性环境感知的结构模型和感知差异

The Difference and Structural Model of Tourist's Perceived Restorative Environment

旅游者对恢复性环境的感知是旅游者对旅游目的地的一种综合性体验,是旅游者与旅游地环境相互作用的结果。文章以九寨沟国内旅游者为研究对象,基于一致性、新奇、迷人、逃逸和兼容性5个维度,探讨了旅游者恢复性环境感知特征及其差异,检验了恢复性环境感知维度间的影响关系。研究结果表明:(1)由一致性、新奇、迷人、逃逸和兼容性5个维度组成的恢复性环境感知量表具有较好的信度和效度。(2)九寨沟旅游者的恢复性环境感知在一致性、新奇和兼容性等3个维度上存在一定差异。(3)恢复性环境感知的5个维度间并不是独立的,而是一种具有影响关系的结构。一致性维度对新奇、迷人、逃逸和兼容性维度具有显著的正向影响,新奇维度对迷人、逃逸和兼容性维度具有显著的正向影响,表明旅游者恢复性环境感知是一个渐进式的心理感知过程。

Restorative environments are an important component of international research in the fields of tourism sciences, environmental psychology, and health geography. Assessments of the restorative quality of such destinations by tourists who visit them provide global perceptions of these places. Their restorative experiences can be viewed as resulting from complex human-environment transactions. However, despite the accumulation of a significant amount of theory and empirical studies on restorative environments and experiences in recent decades, relatively little is known about the inherent psychological mechanisms that influence these experiences. The aim of this paper is to identify characteristics of and differences in tourists＇ perceptions of restorative environments, and to examine the structural relationships among these dimensions. Taking Jiuzhai Valley as our case study area, we distributed an on-site questionnaire to domestic tourists visiting this area. These self-administered questionnaires, focusing on Jiuzhai Valley as a destination, were distributed to a total of 612 tourists in August 2012. All of the questionnaires were returned, and of these, we included 563 as our data set after filtering out incomplete questionnaires. Basing our analysis on attention restoration theory, we chose five structural variables： coherence, novelty, fascination, escape, and compatibility to construct a structural model reflecting causal relationships among perceived restorative characteristics. Data from this model were analyzed using a structural equation model. The results that we obtained were as follows. First, the tests were confirmed to be reasonable and valid. The perceived restorative environment scale demonstrated internal consistency, reliability, construct validity, and discriminant validity. Characteristics of and differences in tourists＇ perceptions of restorative environment were measured using this scale in Jiuzhai Valley and the above- mentioned five dimensions of coherence, novelty, fascination, escape, and compatibility. Second, the analysis revealed differences in relation to three of the dimensions of tourists＇ perceptions, namely, coherence, novelty, and compatibility. Significant differences existed between different age groups and income groups, for both the coherence and the compatibility dimensions. The significance levels for each of these dimensions were the same at 0.01 and 0.05 for age groups and income groups, respectively. There were also significant differences between gender groups for the novelty dimension at a significance level of 0.05. However, there were no significant differences between groups regarding the fascination and escape dimensions. A third finding was that restorative components were not parallel predictors, but rather they were positively correlated. Coherence evidently had significant positive influences on novelty, fascination, escape, and compatibility. Similarly, novelty exerted significant positive influences on fascination, escape, and compatibility. These findings suggest that a well-coordinated tourist destination environment provides the basis for improving tourists＇ perceptions of restorative environments. It is important that the various environmental factors match with the total environment. The development of tourists＇ perceptions of a restorative environment entails a gradual process of psychological perception. Two of the dimensions of their perceptions, coherence and novelty, are related to characteristics of the tourist destination environment itself. The three other dimensions, namely, fascination, escape, and compatibility describe a psychological evaluation of the interaction between an individual and a tourist destination environment. The findings indicate that perceived characteristics of the tourist destination environment influence the psychological evaluation of the tourist-environment interaction. This study thus provides a new perspective for understanding the mechanism by which a tourist destination environment influences people＇s physical and mental health.