摘要
旅游从一开始便一直与教育相关。在当代社会,为儿童提供可供选择的旅游体验被视为一种良好教养的象征。虽然业界已认识到儿童市场的重要性,并采取了积极的方法来开发产品和服务去吸引这个细分市场,但是学术研究仍显得相当不够。文章对儿童旅游研究进行了回顾,从不同角度对儿童旅游研究进行评论,并揭示现有研究中儿童主要是作为被动的而不是主动的研究对象。最后,从理论和方法的角度对未来研究提出建议。
Tourism has long been associated with education since its beginning and in contemporary society providing children with alternative travel experience is seen as a symbol of good parenting.Recognizing the importance of childrens market, industry has been taken proactive approach to appeal to the needs and desires of this market segment. Studies in marketing suggested that children are important in the family consumption decision making process and their opinions are included in the examination of children s behavior as consumers. Given the significant role children play in family travel decision as well as the growing importance of this market, it is somewhat surprising that academic research on childrens behavior as tourists remains insufficient.According to Poria and Timothy（2014）, the dearth of understanding can be attributed to ethical,conceptual, and methodological factors. Ethically, conducting research with children requires more complicated research ethics review by ethics committees inside and outside the university. Conceptually,there is insufficient theories in the field of tourism to conceptualize the studies on/with children.Researchers may also encounter methodological difficulties in that research on/with children requires specific techniques and procedures at various developmental stages. Despite the difficulties in studying childrens travel behavior, there is an increasing interest in children tourism in the past three years. The purpose of the current research is to, through a comprehensive review of children tourism research published in Chinese and English, provide a state-of-art assessment of studies on children tourism and identify the future research agenda.A total of 48 relevant articles were identified and reviewed in this study. It is revealed that research on children as tourists has been largely contextualized in family travel decision making. Researchers hold that children play increasingly important role in family travel decision making and their roles gradually change from passive receiver to active participant. The second stream of research focuses on children s travel experience. Three types of experiences were identified： sensory experience, social experience, and cognitive experience. Another thread of research is on the benefits of travel. A summary of previous studies indicates that major benefits children can obtain from travel include social development, cognitive development, happiness, and rehabilitation.Contributing significantly to the body of knowledge of tourism by expanding the scope of inquiry and presenting empirical methods and data pertaining to children, existing studies were not able to answer many of the fundamental questions regarding children as tourists, as most of the existing studies relied on data collected from the adults. Childrens voice as tourists is largely muted. The current study therefore suggested that children themselves, as active and creative social agents who are able to produce their own culture as tourists, should be the target of future research. Cross-disciplinary research with innovative methods is also badly called for.
出处
《旅游学刊》
CSSCI
北大核心
2016年第9期61-71,共11页
Tourism Tribune
基金
国家自然科学基金项目"基于儿童地理学的儿童城市游憩空间感知与体验研究"(41401154)资助~~
关键词
儿童
旅游
家庭度假
研究综述
children
tourism
family vacation
research review
