The Self-construal Research Of Tourists

The pursuit of outside world is one of nature to human, and human search for the nature of self at the same time. They try all means to answer these questions: Who I am? Where do I come from? Where should I go? Then whether the tourism is the process that the tourists pursue self, what change has occurred in tourists through tourism activities and what kinds of self the tourists have constructed. These questions arouse my interest.Based on this, I take the tourists as the research object and introduce the self-construal theory with the purpose of studying the self-construal of tourists. The selection of tourists focused on those that their route has great cultural differences between tourism market and tourism destination, because the impact of foreign culture makes it easier for tourists to change himself or herself and to deeply think of the self. Self-construal refers to the perceptions that individuals have about their thoughts, feelings and actions in relation to others. It is how people perceive themselves to be linked (or not) with other people. Essentially self-construal is kind of cognitive style of self. People will be more clearly about who I am and how I should treat others, then give the self the correct positioning through self-construal. Meanwhile, the tourists can expand and improve themselves.The significance of this study has three aspects. Firstly, sort out the theory of self-construal to construct the theoretical system. This offer new perspectives for the research of tourists behavior and enrich the theory of tourists experience. Secondly, I get the species of self that the tourists constructed during the cross-cultural tour tourism activities. Thirdly, clarify the function of self-construal of tourists. The importance of tourism is to know the existence state of self, and that is self-construal. Therefore, self-construal provides a new research direction to dig the significance of tourism.The self-construal of tourists involves their inner psychological changes, this kinds of problem are more suitable for qualitative research. At the same time, the material of this research is the blogs written by tourists and the interview data obtained through interviews. They all belong to text data. It is more appropriate to apply qualitative research to analyze text data.Through analysis, the main conclusions obtained in this study are as follows:(1)Self-construal refers to the perceptions that individuals have about their thoughts, feelings and actions in relation to others. It has the characteristics of continuity and uniformity, situational and hysteresis. The classification develops from dual self-construal to triple self-construal. The dual self-construal includes individual and relational self-construal, and it becomes triple self-construal by adding collective self-construal. From the stability point of view, self-construal can also be divided into chronic self-construal and situational self-construal. Individual begins the process of self-construal by narrative. Space and time conversion capabilities are an important factor of self-construal. It enables the individual to understand the past from the third party point of view and construct self. At the same time, the self-construal of individual is inseparable from others. They can see his own shadow from others experiences.(2)Through the analysis of all the text data, I believe that tourists construct social self, spiritual self and ideal self during the cross-cultural tourism activities. Social self refers to the individual's social attributes, not only including how we are treated and admitted by others, but also including how we perceive and admit ourselves. It can be divided into individual self and relational self. Spiritual self refers to the spiritual feelings that the individual gained from tourism experience, including scenic self and psychical self. Ideal self refers to the self that the individual want to be, including projected on others and tour self.(3) There are two aspects functions of the self-construal of tourists:individual function and social function. Individual functions are mainly reflected in that self-construal can make tourists more mature and stable, change their life, meet their pursuit of the spiritual world, and improve the quality of their travel experiences. Social functions are mainly reflected in changing the social atmosphere and improve their interpersonal relationships. Of course, there are also some shortages in this study. Because the academic and theoretical level is not good enough and I am not so skilled in applying the qualitative research, the conclusions maybe need further work to test. Meanwhile I feel the research is not deep enough and this subject has a long way to go. In addition, the text data obtained in this study comes mainly from http://www.lvping.com/, and the source is not rich enough. The participant concentrated in highly educated group of students. There may be some homogeneity in the Interview data.This study is not an end but a very beginning. For further research, I think there are two directions. The first one is the enrichment and improvement of the self-construal theory; the second one is to research the self-construal of the tourists who travel to different types of culture and compare their similarities and differences.