How does virtual tourism involvement impact the social education effect of cultural heritage?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2023.100779Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Virtual tourism involvement is proposed in this study.

  • Virtual tourism involvement helps cultural heritage play social education effect.

  • Multiple variables also play important role in virtual tourism.

  • Mechanisms among multiple variables in virtual tourism are demonstrated.

Abstract

Cultural heritage has benefited from virtual tourism in the post-epidemic era, but more research is needed to understand how virtual tourism can contribute to cultural heritage's social education effect. Based on the theory of involvement, this study takes the Forbidden City as a case to examine the social education mechanism of tourists involved in virtual cultural heritage tourism. The results show that virtual tourism involvement has a significant positive effect on tourists' place imagination, experience memory and affective attachment; tourists' place imagination has a significant positive effect on experience memory and affective attachment; tourists' experience memory has a significant positive effect on affective attachment; tourists' affective attachment has a significant positive effect on social education effect. Furthermore, tourists' place imagination mediates the relationship between virtual tourism involvement and experience memory; tourists' place imagination has a partial mediating effect between virtual tourism involvement and affective attachment; tourists' experience memory mediates the relationship between virtual tourism involvement and affective attachment; tourists' experience memory has a partial mediating effect between place imagination and affective attachment. Tourists' past experience moderates the relationship between virtual tourism involvement and place imagination, experience memory, affective attachment. This study confirms virtual cultural heritage tourism has a similar social education effect as realistic cultural heritage tourism and extends involvement theory in the virtual context, promoting the practice of virtual cultural heritage tourism.

Introduction

Virtual tourism used to be considered a supplement to realistic tourism but has gradually become a particular travel mode. The application of virtual reality technology in tourism destinations has been proven to reconstruct real spaces in virtual-world scenarios, connect imagining emotions and authentic ‘ordinariness’ (Bartley & Hancock, 2008), stimulate more human imagination and emotional response (Holsapple & Wu, 2007), and finally lead to a high level of realistic travel intention (Chung et al., 2015; Kim et al., 2018; Tussyadiah et al., 2018). However, the COVID-19 pandemic has stalled the development of realistic tourism with declining travel demand, and Forbidden City tourism has decreased by more than 92% (Yang et al., 2021). With the advantage of having experiences without being in the real scene, virtual tourism has the opportunity to quickly develop and gradually transform into a new interactive mode of travel, namely, travel-at-home (Osman, 2022) in such a context. Some previous studies have stated that virtual tourism can arouse emotions (Li et al., 2020) and create authentic experience memories for tourists (Hyun et al., 2009; Mura et al., 2017).

The peculiarity of virtual reality technology also promotes the development of virtual tourism at cultural heritage sites. Studies on virtual cultural heritage tourism have found that virtual reality technology contributes to the new interactions between tourists and heritage (Baik, 2021; Poux et al., 2020), the marketing effect of virtual reality technology on cultural heritage sites (Atzeni et al., 2022; Marasco et al., 2018; Tsai, 2022), and the influence of virtual heritage experiences in increasing tourists' satisfaction and intentions to visit heritage sites (Atzeni et al., 2022; Chung et al., 2015; Li et al., 2021). Tourism serves as an essential form of cultural communication and education (Guillén-Peñafiel et al., 2022; Paulova et al., 2020). Although realistic cultural heritage tourism helps spread the concept of heritage protection and transfer historical and cultural knowledge (García-Almeida, 2019; Lussetyowati, 2015), little attention has been given to the social education effect of virtual cultural heritage tourism. That is, realistic cultural heritage tourism, unlike virtual cultural heritage tourism, has been proven to have an important social education effect, while the effect of the latter has been ignored. A few studies mention that virtual cultural heritage tourism helps enhance the educational function in realistic cultural heritage (Dieck & Jung, 2017), disseminate cultural heritage knowledge and foster public awareness (Caciora et al., 2021). Virtual marine tourism has the potential for wider engagement and conservation awareness (Hofman et al., 2022). Thus, virtual cultural heritage tourism may have a considerable positive potential social education effect, providing a way to display the value of cultural heritage. It is necessary to address whether virtual cultural heritage tourism has a social education effect and how it exerts such effect.

Involvement theory has an important impact on tourists' value orientations and behavioural willingness (Filo et al., 2013). Involvement theory is frequently used to analyse the impact of travelling and the relationship between tourists and tourism destinations but fails to focus on the social education impact brought by tourism. Experience memory and place imagination are mostly used as important mediating variables to explore the relationship between tourists' involvement and behavioural intentions in realistic tourism (Hudson et al., 2011; Loureiro, 2014). Tourists' involvement, experience memory and place imagination all have a positive impact on affective attachment (Dong & Qu, 2022; Fan & Qiu, 2014). In addition, past experience, as a moderator variable, is commonly used to study tourists’ perception degree (Wang et al., 2020). However, these variables are seldom used to evaluate the social education effect of cultural heritage tourism, and the relationships between them remain unpresented, especially in the virtual tourism context.

With the increasing importance of virtual tourism and its transformation into a tourism mode, this study trys to determine whether virtual cultural heritage tourism has similar social education effect as realistic cultural heritage tourism. The involvement theory is introduced in the study areas of virtual tourism and virtual cultural heritage tourism as well as its social education effect, broadening its theoretical application. Experience memory, place imagination, affective attachment and past experience are used to further develop the involvement theory in the virtual tourism context and the practice of virtual cultural heritage tourism.

Section snippets

Theoretical basis

Involvement was first proposed by psychologists Munzafer Sherif and Hadley Cantril (1947), and it is mainly used to measure individuals' personal attitude structure, including what is important, meaningful and relevant for themselves. Involvement was often used by individuals to judge both themselves and others, influencing individual behavioural decisions (Zaichkowsky, 1986). After the 1960s, the concept of involvement was gradually applied in research fields such as consumer behaviour (

Research location

The VR panoramic videos of the Forbidden City in Beijing were selected as the subject for this research (https://pano.dpm.org.cn/gugong_pano/index.html). The Forbidden City in Beijing was built in the early 15th century during the reign of Zhu Di, an emperor of the Ming Dynasty. It covers an area of 720,000 m2 with a 150,000 m2 building area, comprising more than 70 palaces and 9000 rooms. As the imperial palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasty in China, the Forbidden City is located in the heart

Common method bias

This study ensured the quality of questionnaire recovery through anonymous questionnaires and reversed items, emphasising that there was no right or wrong answer. After data collection, this study included all items in an unrotated factor analysis. The results showed that the KMO value of the whole scale was 0.962, and the variance explained rate of first principal component was 45.423%, which was less than the critical criterion of 50%. This result is in line with the common method bias test

Conclusions

First, virtual tourism involvement has significant positive effects on place imagination, in line with the findings of Cowan and Ketron (2019); virtual tourism involvement has significant positive effects on experience memory, in line with Hofman et al. (2022) and Mura et al. (2017), acknowledging the authentic experience memory brought by virtual tourism involvement; virtual tourism involvement has significant positive effects on affective attachment, in line with the study on the relationship

Author statement

Fengyi Ji: Conceptualization, Writing, Literature Review, Fang Wang: Conceptualization, Writing, Methodology, Software, Bihu Wu: Supervision.

Financial disclosure

There are no financial conflicts of interest to disclose.

Acknowledgment

This research was funded by the large-scale project of Quanzhou Social Science Planning (2022C11).

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