La Psicología Positiva y el Comportamiento Proturismo de los Residentes

Abstract

In recent decades, tourism worldwide has grown exponentially and has become one of the key sectors for the development of many economies. Building a sustainable tourism destination fundamentally requires the participation and collaboration of all stakeholders. In this context, residents are a key link playing multiple roles: as an integral part of a destination's image, their characteristics and behaviours largely condition customer satisfaction with their tourism experience; as ambassadors of a place, their opinions are perceived by the visitor as authentic, trustworthy and credible; and as citizens they are vital for the political legitimisation of a place's brand (Braun et al., 2013). It could be argued, without a doubt, that for a tourism destination to develop sustainably and successfully it is necessary to have the active support of the local community and its residents (Gursoy et al., 2010; Olya, 2020; Pearce, 1998; Sharpley, 2014; Sinclair-Margh & Gursoy, 2016). Precisely, one of the great challenges facing research in the field of tourism is to advance in the understanding of the real behaviour that the resident develops with respect to tourism/tourist. In this regard, there is a lack of agreement on the measurement of this variable (Chen & Raab, 2015) and the scales used fail to capture sufficient information for high levels of it (Liu et al., 2022). Likewise, although many authors stress the importance of personal values in explaining attitudes and behavioural intentions, so far, research in the field of tourism has paid little attention to this fact. In order to fill the existing gaps in the literature, the general objective of this doctoral thesis is to study the pro-tourism attitude and behaviour of residents and the impact that certain variables related to positive psychology and the psychological state of the individual may have on it. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of the origin, background and evolution of the concept of happiness from the perspective of positive psychology and its link with tourism. Chapter 3 presents a detailed review of the literature on residents' behaviours towards tourism and an analysis of the scales used to measure them. The systematic review carried out following the protocol set by the PRISMA model (Liberati et al., 2009), has allowed us to identify and classify behaviours according to various criteria. Chapters 4 and 5 show two empirical models: one based on TRA theory to determine whether true altruism influences the attitudes, intentions and Word-Of-Mouth (WOM) behaviour of residents, and other that integrates the concept of true altruism as a personal value with the basic postulates of the Social Exchange Theory (SET) and the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in order to explain the behaviour of the resident as Gratuitous Referrals at Destination (GRAD). In both models we introduce a novel variable, altruism, with the aim of shedding light on residents' attitudes, intentions and behaviours towards tourism activity in their locality. This research corroborates the basic postulates of TRA regarding the sequence attitudes-intentions-behaviours and argues for the inclusion of residents' attitudes towards pro-tourism behaviour in TRA-based models instead of the traditional attitude towards the object (tourism or tourist). In this sense, the results also show how the factors influencing residents' attitudes towards GRAD behaviour differ substantially from those conditioning attitudes towards tourism in general. The findings of the studies have implications for tourism managers and researchers.