Tourists and Indigenous Tour Guides: An Exploration of Roles, Relationships, and Intercultural Interactions
Open Access
- Author:
- Beeftink, Karen
- Graduate Program:
- Leisure Studies
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 07, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Deborah Lee Kerstetter, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Deborah Lee Kerstetter, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kelly S Bricker, Committee Member
Christine Buzinde, Committee Member
Garry Chick, Committee Member
Michelle E Day, Committee Member - Keywords:
- intercultural relations
sustainable tourism
indigenous tourism
social and cultural impacts
tour guides
Tourist-host interactions
Contact Hypothesis - Abstract:
- The aim of this study was to examine tourist-tour guide interactions. Specifically, I sought to understand tourist and tour guide perceptions of their interactions with each other, and to discover factors that influence their interactions. This was accomplished by exploring interactions between indigenous tour guides and foreign tourists in an ecotourism setting, and accounting for the perspectives of both tour guides and tourists. I conducted a qualitative, naturalistic inquiry using participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with indigenous tour guides and foreign tourists in the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. To help focus the study, I utilized a conceptual framework based on the Contact Hypothesis (Allport, 1979) and on tourism impact literature to examine factors that influence interactions between indigenous tour guides and foreign tourists. Data analysis revealed two distinct overarching themes. The first focused on tourist and guide descriptions of the roles and relationships they experienced in their interactions; the second encompassed factors that influenced their interactions. Based on the results relating to roles and relationships, I proposed extensions and amendments to Cohen’s (1985), Weiler and Davis’ (1993), and Howard et al.’s (2001) models of guide roles to account for modified and additional roles experienced by indigenous ecotourism guides, and to encapsulate a tourist’s role in the interaction. I also extended the model to capture relationship roles enacted and experienced by tourists and guides. Results pertaining to factors that influence tourist-guide interactions supported some aspects of previous literature, but revealed complexities that challenge the practice of simply labeling a factor as a facilitator or impediment. Results also challenged previous assumptions of cultural dissimilarity as an impediment; the findings indicated that cultural differences can be a basis for, and facilitator of, guide-tourist interactions. Hence, I proposed extensions and amendments to the Contact Hypothesis for use in a tourism setting to better capture interactions between indigenous tour guides and foreign tourists, and to reflect the complexities of such interactions. In addition, I offered practical implications for guide training and for tourist education and preparation. I also suggested for future research to examine the effects of third-party guides and of site accessibility on indigenous guide-tourist interactions. Finally, I recommended longitudinal research to investigate longer-term effects of guide-tourist interactions.