Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
self-reports remain the most popular method to capture emotional experiences (Diener 2000).
Typically, respondents rate their emotional reactions to a stimulus. Marketing scholars often adapt
psychology-based self-report measures to fi t the consumption context. Four common
psychological scales include Plutchik's (1980) eight primary emotions, Izard's (1977) Differential
Emotion Scales (DES), Mehrabian and Russell's (1974) Pleasure, Arousal and Dominance (PAD)
scale and Watson
et al
. (1988) Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS).
In recent years, concerns are surfacing about the applicability, reliability and validity of
adapting psychological emotion scales in consumer studies (e.g. Richins 1997; Laros and
Steenkamp 2005; Schoefer and Diamantopoulos 2008). Since these scales were not developed
purposely for consumer research, they are unlikely to capture the entire domain of consumption
related emotions, suggesting important shortcomings. Realizing the need for sound measures,
some marketing scholars have developed context-specifi c emotion scales. For example, Richins'
(1997) Consumption Emotion Set (CES) captures emotions encountered during consumption
experiences. Honea and Dahl's (2005) Promotion Affect Scale (PAS) assesses consumers'
emotional reactions to sale promotion offers. More recently, Schoefer and Diamantopoulos
(2008) developed a scale to measure experienced emotions during service recovery encounters.
Hosany and Gilbert (2010) note existing taxonomies from psychology and marketing do
not take into account tourism and destination-specifi c characteristics. Adapting existing
scales fails to achieve content validity, leading to erroneous conclusions (see Haynes
et al
. 1995).
To measure tourists' emotional responses toward destinations, by means of two empirical studies,
Hosany and Gilbert (2010) follow a rigorous process, consistent with conventional guidelines in
developing the destination emotion scale (DES). The DES captures the diversity and intensity
of tourists' emotional responses toward destinations. Hosany and Gilbert's (2010) study reveal a
parsimonious three-dimensional (joy, love and positive surprise) 15-item scale, displaying solid
psychometric properties in terms of unidimensionality, reliability and validity (see
Table 33.1
).
The scale dimensions are theoretically consistent with past and more recent conceptualizations
of emotion in consumer research. Five items measure Joy (cheerful, pleasure, joy, enthusiasm and
delight). Joy is an intrinsic component of peak experiences (e.g. Mathes
et al
. 1982) that is often
Table 33.1
The destination emotion scale: initial and final scale statistics
Items
Study 1 (S1):
N=200
Study 2 (S2):
N=520
S1
S2
S1
S2
S1
S2
Factor
loading
a
Item-total
correlation
Factor
loading
b
Item-total
correlation
Coefficient
alpha (
a
)
Composite
reliability
Average
variance
extracted
Joy
Cheerful
c
Pleasure
c
Joy
c
Enthusiasm
c
Delight
c
Enjoyment
Happiness
Entertained
Comfortable
.87
.89
.83
.86
.50
.55
.83
.70
.69
.69
.60
.73
.71
.71
.69
.76
.73
.73
.69
.70
.70
.75
.69
.61
.71
.71
.79
.69
.79
.72
.77
.74
.71
.76
(Continued)
