Place attachment to pseudo establishments: An application of the stimulus-organism-response paradigm to themed hotels

By Jia Sun, Po-Ju Chen, Lianping Ren, Erin Hui-Wen Shih, Caiwei Ma, Han Wang, Nhu-Hang Ha. 2020

96 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study uses the Mehrabian-Russell model to assess place attachment in the themed-hotel context. We explored the theoretical framework using four constructs related to the stimulus-organism-response paradigm. A total of 282 usable survey questionnaires were collected from travelers to test our hypotheses. We conducted multiple stages of data analysis, using structural equation modeling (SEM) and generative probabilistic modeling to verify the findings. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was adopted to further verify key attributes in servicescapes. According to the SEM results, social cues are positively associated with pleasant arousal, and ambience cues are positively associated with social cues. We also verified that pleasant arousal is positively associated with place attachment. Furthermore, we confirmed that emotional factors can trigger the formation of place attachment to a themed hotel. The LDA results allowed us to further classify servicescapes by design cues, social cues, and ambience cues. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23d5e0a2e4948c626e75edf2d201fe76d0082c61