Tourist destination images and stereotypes : a study of backpacker images of Australia
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates images that actual and potential backpacker tourists hold of Australia and explores structure, evolution and influence of these tourist destination images. This is an exploratory study drawing on a wide range of literature spanning disciplines of geography, sociology, anthropology, planning, marketing and psychology, but it is largely grounded within sub-discipline of behavioural geography. The primary purpose of thesis is to investigate whether concepts of 'stereotyping' and 'images' in behavioural geography can make a contribution to understanding of tourist destination images and tourist behaviour. A secondary purpose is to identify implications of these findings and applications they might have to assist tourism planning and policy in Australia.Tourist destination images are defined as the expression of all objective knowledge, impressions, prejudice, imaginations, and emotional thoughts an individual or group might have of a particular place (Lawson and Baud-Bovy 1977, 10). Thus tourist destination images are conceived as operating both at a collective level where many people within a culture may share particular aspects of an image, and at an individual level whereby an individual person may hold both stereotypical and idiosyncratic ideas about a particular tourist destination. The concept of 'image' used in this thesis includes both visual and verbal representations. In this way thesis fills a gap in literature as almost all previous research has focused exclusively on word-based measurements of tourist destination image. Innovative techniques developed for measuring visual aspects of image, including photo-sorting and 'auto-photography' and have been incorporated into study.The thesis employs concept of 'stereotypes' to explore structure of tourist destination images. The evolution of tourist destination images is examined from individual perspective by comparing images held by tourists before travel and after travel. The findings support Gunn's (1972) seven-stage model of image evolution, and model is expanded to incorporate a stereotype structure. The influence of tourist destination images is also investigated in terms of how image affects tourist decisionmaking, tourist photography and collective representations of destination.The primary research for thesis focused on one type of tourist, namely 'backpackers', who are mainly young, independent budget travellers and who usually travel for extended periods and may participate in a range of activities including work and study during their travels.Two phases of data collection were conducted to address two main research issues. Phase I addressed issue 'What are tourist destination images and stereotypes of Australia held by backpacker tourists and how are they cognitively structured?' It was a mainly qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 31 Canadians, Dutch and Japanese backpackers travelling in Australia. The images and stereotypes of Australia held by these three nationalities were compared and several common stereotypes were identified, most prominent being pictures of Uluru and Sydney Opera House, warm weather and beaches, and 'Crocodile Dundee' persona. Some differences in emphasis between these images among three nationalities were also identified. It is suggested that these differences are in part explained by 'home anchor', in that backpackers highlight certain aspects of image of Australia that contrast with their home country: for instance, Canadians emphasize warmth and tropical beaches while Dutch and Japanese emphasize vastness and wide-open spaces of outback.Phase II addressed issue 'How do tourist destination images and stereotypes evolve and influence backpackers' behaviour?' It was a mainly quantitative study that involved surveying 92 Canadian backpackers about their image of Australia. Three groups of backpackers corresponding to Gunn's (1972) three image stages were targetted:Group 1: Backpackers not intending to visit Australia in next three years (an 'organic image group')Group 2: Backpackers intending to visit Australia in next three years (an 'induced image group')Group 3: Backpackers returned from visiting Australia (a 'modified-induced image group')
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it