Abstract
As a positive psychological resource, the concept of the flow experience has attracted significant attention across various domains. However, there remain gaps in our understanding of the underlying psychological processes governing the flow experience as well as its relevance and potential applications within the tourism industry. This study aims to address these gaps by exploring the interrelationships among the different dimensions of the flow experience and providing empirical evidence for the psychological process thereof. Specifically, this study considers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as an external environmental variable by collecting data from tourists who visited the same destination before and after the pandemic. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that the pandemic exerted a significant influence on the factors initiating the flow experience, the degree of process control, and tourists’ perceptions of time during their experience. In light of these findings, we recommend that tourism industry managers be vigilant regarding changes in tourists’ psychological states during the post-pandemic recovery phase and consider offering high-quality services as a means to enhance tourist satisfaction and foster loyalty.
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Notes
For more details, see here. The trend is described in the figure “Total COVID-19 cases reported to WHO (weekly)” in Section “Trends in COVID-19 cases, World”.
For more details, see here. The statistics since 2020 were not chosen because the development of tourism was greatly hindered by the COVID-19 pandemics.
To maintain consistent terminology with Henseler et al. (2016), we refer to composites in our test of measurement invariance while referring to constructs in a structural model analysis.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all those who have supported and assisted us throughout the completion of this research.
First, we are grateful to the participants of this research for sharing their experiences and opinions, particularly during the challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, we acknowledge the valuable contributions of our research team members and colleagues in the data collection and analysis process.
Funding
This research is supported by the major planning project “History of Chinese Marketing Thought” at Renmin University of China (Project Number: 22XNLG08).
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Xuejiao Lin: Writing original draft, Investigation, Conceptualization. Jiajun Feng: Writing original draft, Data curation, Methodology. Qian Yang: Writing original draft, Conceptualization. Guoqing Guo: Editing and polishing, Project administration.
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Lin, X., Feng, J., Yang, Q. et al. Exploring the psychological dynamics of the flow experience in tourism: a comparative study of the pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic periods. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06079-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06079-1