Study On The Influence Of Social Media On Youth Tourists’ Decision-Making Behaviors In Chengdu

With the dramatic development of the Internet technology, disruptive changes have paved the way for tourists to get comprehensive and detailed information. Rapidly accepted by the public, social media have already been the emerging carrier of tourism information, playing the role of the convenient transmitting tool of information, simultaneously affecting the tourists’ consumption and decision-making behavior. In recent years, the study of tourists’ behavior is getting cumulative concerns from domestic and foreign scholars, while the research on social media’s influence on tourists’ decision-making behavior is still in its infancy, lacking influencing factors and models. In this context, this thesis focuses on the way of social media’s influence in young tourists’ decision-making behavior through the empirical analysis of its influence processes and factors.This thesis, consisting of three parts, is dedicated to discuss social media’s influence on the decision-making behavior of young tourists.The first part consists of the introduction, literature review and theoretical basis. Firstly this part introduces the research background, purpose, contextual content, significance, methods and technical routes through the literature reading, data analysis and practical experience. Then, the literature review and the related theories are explicitly sorted and summarized in this part, including both foreign and domestic academic researches of social media, tourists’ decision-making behavior, and six-degrees of separation, involvement degree, trust level, perceived value of propagation science, psychology, behavioral science and etc.The current situation and development trend of the tourism application in the social media is analyzed in the second part, presenting that social media, such as the micro-blog, online travel communities and travel reviews sites, has also produced certain effect to tourists’ behavior more or less. Then, both the general process and influence factors have been summarized and discussed in this context, revealing the process of the tourists’ decision-making under the influence of social media, also refining that the influence factors of tourists’ decision-making, including the information attraction, the relationship strength, tourism involvement, cognitive trust and perceived value, come from Information characteristics, Presentity characteristics and Watcher characteristics with the social media utilization.The third part has constructed the theoretical model according to the influence factors. The propositional hypothesis, the predesigned scale and questionnaire have also been put forward for the empirical research. Based on the modification of the predecessors’ mature design, the research scales in this thesis have also been extracted and purified after the preceding investigation, and have presented the final survey in the Chengdu’s representative scenic spots. After the data collection and sample selection, valid samples have been carried out the descriptive statistical analysis, reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis by using the software SPSS. Through the analysis, it turns out to prove that the following dimensions, including the information attraction in social media, the relationship strength with publisher, tourism involvement in social media, cognitive trust of the travel information in social media, have positive influence on the perceived value of the travel information in social media. And it finally refines that all these dimensions, including the perceived value of the travel information in social media, have the positive influence on tourists’ decision-making. Finally, there is the summary of the thesis, consisting of the conclusion of the insufficiency in this research, and the prospect of the future.