The objectives of this dissertation was to 1) develop a comprehensive scale to measure visitors' imagination, 2) investigate the structural relationship between imagination and tourism destination image (TDI) components of cognitive, affective, and conative, 3) compare and contrast the various qualities of vividness, richness, saliency, control, and spatial between imagination and prospection, and 4) study the impact of different information sources on the evolving process of prospection to imagination. By conducting four different studies and seven data collection phases, the imagination scale was developed, validated, and utilized to test the proposed structural and differential hypotheses. In study 1, the phenomenology approach was employed and through a series of interviews, the internal experience of the imagination process was extracted. In study 2, which is composed of two focus groups, the potential manifest variables to measure imagination/prospection were developed and the structure of the questionnaire was designed. In study 3, through 3 data collection phases, two versions of long and short imagination scale questionnaire were validated and the structural relationships between imagination and destination image was investigated. In the final study, utilizing experimental design, hypotheses related to five qualities of imagination were compared to those of prospection. Finally, by adopting an exploratory approach, the impact of different information sources on imagination was investigated. The results of this dissertation indicated that the imagination scale is a reliable and valid scale to be used in various hospitality and tourism consumption contexts. It shows a high discriminant validity with TDI and structurally moderates the inter-relationships of the TDI components. In addition, findings of this dissertation support the theoretical discussions on the differences between imagination and prospection. Finally, the results revealed significant distinctions among image, video, and textual information sources regarding their impact on the quality of the mental image.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-7075 |
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Creators | Khalilzadeh, Jalayer |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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