旅游研究中的代际理论及其应用述评

Generation Theory and Its Application of Tourism Research

旅游消费行为和偏好等旅游市场研究是旅游理论发展与操作实践的核心内容,而代际研究能很好地解释游客的旅游消费行为。文章通过对代际理论发展及其在旅游研究中应用的相关文献进行详细梳理和分析,从代际理论内涵、代际划分和代际理论在旅游研究中的应用3方面综述了国内外代际理论在旅游研究中应用的最新研究进展。发现国外从代际理论视角研究游客旅游消费行为,既注重代际之间差异的横向对比,又重视同个代不同时段的纵向分析,还关注年龄、代群、周期性外部事件等对游客旅游活动的影响,其研究广度和深度不断拓展增强,科学的实证分析也为旅游开发管理提供了有益的理论指导。而国内相关的研究还未广泛展开,既无法进行深入、系统的理论分析,又缺乏严谨、科学的实证探索。因此,当前中国在应用代际理论研究游客旅游消费行为时,应明确中国代际划分、辨析旅游消费行为,开展代际理论与区域差异耦合研究,拓展代际理论在旅游研究中的时空尺度。

Tourism market research including tourism consumer behavior and preference etc is the core content of tourism theory development and operation practice. Generational analysis is one of the most useful segmentation methods, because of the relative homogeneity within generations and obvious heterogeneity across generations.Therefore, generational analysis and generation theory can be used to forecast the needs of different generations and can explain the tourists＇ consumer behavior well. This paper reviews the newly study progresses of the application of generation theory in tourism research from the following three aspects： connotation and extension of generation theory, generation division around the world and China, and the specific application practices in tourism research through analyzing the related studies and references. Internationally, from the perspective of tourists＇ travel consumer behavior, many studies not only focused on the cross-sectional comparisons among the different generations but also paid attention to longitudinal comparison of the same generation and the effects of age, generation cohort and common important affairs on tourist travel consumer behavior. The breadth and depth of the research were constantly expanding, and the scientific empirical study provided the theoretical guidance for the development of tourism management. In contrast, almost no study using generation theory to discuss the tourism consume market was carried out in China. Therefore, the future emphases to study tourism consumer behavior using generation theory should be focused on the following four aspects： 1） clarifying Chinese generation division and characterizing the different generations from the collective memory（significant political,economic, cultural and technological events or environmental resources） rather than their ages; 2） differentiating tourism consumer behavior such as motivations, information sources, destination choices, travel activity preferences and destination evaluation criteria etc; 3） studying the coupling relationship between generation theory and regional differences in geographical location, cultural background, economic level, living conditions,ethnic and religious beliefs, degree of openness to the outside world and other aspects; 4） expanding the spatial and temporal scales of generation theory in tourism research including the comparisons of tourism consumer behavior from different generations and the same generation of different countries.