Research On The Tourist Regret Of Folk Festival

In recent years,Festivals & Special Events(FSEs)have developed rapidly in China because of its enormous contribution to economic,social,cultural and other aspects in the region.As a carrier and inheritance way of local traditional culture,folk festival is an important part of festival tourism activities.However,many folk festivals do not last long,which gradually attracted the attention of scholars.Many scholars focus on the development and utilization of folk festival resources and culture influence or its changes in folk festival.Most of these researches carried out from the perspective of the folk festivals themselves and their organizers.There are few studies on festival tourists thought tourist is a very important relevant subject in folk festivals.Based on the theory of regret in psychology,this study intends to explore how the tourists in the folk festivals feel regret,how the regret psychological mechanism operates,how many types of tourists' regret,and how different types of regret affect the follow-up intention of tourists.Participatory observation,semi-structured interviews were used to obtain primary data,and questionnaire surveys were conducted with 341 tourists in one of the most popular folk festivals in Guangdong Province-2016 Guangzhou Magpie Culture festival.This study established the model which logic thread is "regret antecedent-regret psychology-regret consequence".According to the decision justification theory(DJT),the model put forward two characteristics dimensions of regret,and defined the concept and dimensions of regret antecedent and follow-up behavior intention with the achievements of tourism regret existing researches and pre-research.The study found that the cognition and evaluation of folk festival tourists,which based on the reference point,is the antecedent of their regret.Regret antecedent affects the tourists' regret psychology,and the follow-up behavior intention is the result of regret.In addition,the demographic characteristics such as gender,age,occupation,etc.can lead to different types of regret and follow-up behavioral intentions.This study built the regret psychology mechanism of the folk festival tourists with the structural equation model.For the theoretical contribution,the study has introduced regret theory in psychological field to carry out tourist psychology research and behavior intention analysis,which can enrich the theoretical perspective of folk festival tourism research.This study also provided managerial suggestions for the organizers and managers of the folk festival to improve the external facilities and the quality of service in order to improving the tourists' satisfaction and making full use of cultural connotation of folk festival.