Abstract
This article reports the details of an investigation into tourists’ responses to poverty in four Southern African countries. The study was guided by concepts from positive psychology, notably discussion on the value of emotions and emotional experiences. Initially, nearly 300 Internet travel stories were coded. These stories were drawn systematically from more than 5,000 stories about Southern Africa. Observations about poverty occurred in 11.5% of all stories. In a second phase of the work, the emotions expressed in the poverty-oriented accounts were used to guide the construction of a taxonomy of tourists’ responses. These response types were defined as disengagement, compartmentalization, the lucky self, sympathy/empathy, and corrective action. The value and complexities of using travel Internet stories as data were considered. Further pathways between the present work and the complex issue of poverty alleviation through tourism were noted.
Introduction
The primary purpose of this research is to assess closely tourists’ reactions to poverty in a number of Southern African countries. To frame this purpose, an initial section of this article seeks to acquaint tourism and development researchers with studies in positive psychology. A second link lies in connecting these positive psychology developments to ideas about how people express attitudes and values in stories and accounts of their travels. Next, these fresh views of attitudes are considered in the context of travelers’ stories on the Internet. The aims of the study are then specified as seeking to identify the relative frequency of the reporting of encounters with poverty as well as describing the emotional tone and response to these experiences. It will be argued that the data obtained from these Internet sources can be interpreted with a combination of conceptual approaches from positive psychology, ideas from existing tourism studies, and dynamic approaches to attitude theory. In addition, it will be suggested that the topics and approaches provided by positive psychology build a platform for linking the research to the broader concerns of sustainability and actions directed at poverty alleviation.
The Tourism and Poverty Context
There are several influences encouraging researchers to consider the relationships between tourism and poverty. At the intergovernmental level, the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals asserted the need to reduce poverty as a major goal for a better world (United Nations 2000). The tourism sector responded promptly to these desired outcomes with the UNWTO quite quickly establishing its approaches to poverty reduction through a set of documents and a poverty reduction program commonly referred to as Sustainable Tourism for Eliminating Poverty (ST-EP; UNWTO 2002, 2004). Much of the resulting attention from academic researchers has been directed at understanding and evaluating the economic impacts of tourism at local levels (Ashley and Roe 2003; Bowden 2005; Harrison and Schipani 2007; Spenceley and Goodwin 2007; Bowen and Clarke 2009). In addition, there has been considerable academic commentary on the weaknesses of the pro-poor tourism approaches as well as the celebration of some successes. A good deal of this commentary is concerned with political processes, government–tourism–industry links and the underlying ideologies shaping action (Chok, MacBeth, and Warren 2007; Scheyvens 2007; Schilcher 2007). Undoubtedly, these ideologies and economic assessments are valuable, but as Zhao and Ritchie (2007) suggest there are many stakeholders in what they refer to as “anti-poverty tourism.” Zhao and Ritchie proposed an integrative research framework for the further study of this important social and global concern and included in their framework is attention to the attitudes of tourists. The research developed in the present study follows this specific direction by documenting and exploring the potential implications of tourists’ emotional reactions to poverty. One way of providing new insights into emotional reactions and attitudes to topics and phenomenon is to track the evolution of recent ideas in positive psychology (Pearce 2009). The following section considers the rapid growth of this approach to understanding human behavior with the specific purpose of garnering insights for the study of tourists’ emotional reactions to poverty.
Introducing Positive Psychology
Some movements in academic circles can be dated quite precisely. In 1999 Martin Seligman, as president of the American Psychological Association, outlined a new vision for the science of psychology in the coming century. He observed that the central preoccupations of psychology since the 1940s had been to study the damaged individual. The principal goal of this worthy tradition was to help people to function better within their society. At core, the paradigm was one of correction: realignment to a norm rather than an expansion of human potential. In Seligman’s view, an emphasis on human difficulties and dilemmas had overshadowed other worthy traditions in psychology, including those where a range of scholars had tried to understand more positive aspects of human experience and endeavor (Rogers 1951; Maslow 1954). Seligman and colleagues suggested that a new generic term, positive psychology, be used to define and organize the scientific study of positive emotions, character strengths, and positive institutions (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Importantly, the term positive as used in this context does not connote a necessary devotion to a positivist paradigm and while empirical methods are an important part of positive psychology, much work is also being conducted within interpretive and critical theory frameworks. In the twenty-first century, positive psychology has flourished and there is an active global network of positive psychology researchers (Linley et al. 2006; Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008).
There are two particular themes of interest to tourism researchers in the new positive psychology work. The special efforts to catalogue and assess character strengths and value orientations are particularly noteworthy (Peterson and Seligman 2004). Key character strengths that have been integrated from many cross-cultural resources include optimism, courage, kindness, authenticity, and altruism. Additional character strengths, some of which may be highly pertinent to the task of traveling, include sincerity, achievement, and empathy. It can be suggested that a full consideration of travelers’ values can help provide insights into how travelers might link their visitor experiences to their own and others’ well-being. The approach is independent of but similar to the consideration of life-worlds (Schutz and Luckmann 1974). Van Egmond (2007) has used the life-worlds approach to account for the reactions of Western tourists to people in developing countries where, he asserts, materialism as a value and lived experience shapes most local–tourist encounters. The positive psychology character strengths and value statements can potentially support and expand on this approach.
A second positive psychology direction of special interest lies in finding a new purpose for and establishing the benefits of positive emotions. An important distinction in this field is the difference between and linkages of the terms emotion and affect. Emotion is now widely regarded as the more specific of the two terms and is usually linked with a reaction to a specific object, event, or experience (Fredrickson 2001). The reactions of interest here include not just physiological responses such as heart rate increases or pupil dilation but also include relatively universal and uncontrolled but widely recognized facial expressions indicating a linked set of subjective feelings and thoughts. Typical emotions include well-known experiences such as fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise (Ekman and Davidson 1994; Rosenberg 1998). Emotions are often seen as being shorter in duration than the more general term of affect. As compared to emotions, affect is distinguished in a less fine-grained manner, usually being reported as varying along the dimensions of pleasantness–unpleasantness and/or levels of arousal. To express the difference in more colloquial terms, a response reporting affect would be germane to the question, “How has your day been?” whereas emotion would be relevant to describing the specific experiences of losing one’s car keys or receiving an unexpected gift from an old friend. The linkages between the terms center on the fact that both have a subjective experience component. The contrast can be highlighted by noting that for the term emotion, the subjective experience and reporting of that experience are just some components of the responses involved, whereas for affect, the subjective experience and its reports are the totality of the concept (Russell and Feldman Barrett 1999). The psychological reactions to be studied in this research on reactions to poverty could most accurately be described as centered on emotion because there is a specific topic described and some fine-grained travelers’ written reactions are available for analysis.
In positive psychology, the assessment of positive emotions reaches beyond definitional concerns and simple assertions that emotions are linked to well-being. In addition, the approach emphasizes that positive emotions predispose people to collect more and different kinds of information about their setting. In turn, this broadens and builds their resilience and capacities (Frederickson 1998, 2001; Frederickson and Losada 2005). The “broaden and build” theory espoused by Fredrickson implies that tourists who are experiencing new and interesting places are likely to be mindful (cf. Moscardo 2009) and receptive to thinking about and feeling the impact of situations to which they are exposed. As a preface to subsequent considerations in this paper, the topic of tourists’ emotions and the insights of Fredrickson and colleagues provide an important base for extending traditional tourism research on both stressful and highly pleasant experiences. One important issue to consider in this context lies in the use of the positive psychology ideas to interpret the reactions to poverty. For some readers, it might appear that there is an implicit contradiction in the framing of this study. In particular, the discussion of positive psychology in the introductory section of this article was about the role of positive emotions and yet the study focuses on poverty, which surely elicits negative emotions. This perspective misses the key point that travelers having a good time and enjoying many aspects of their overall holiday experience are likely to be experiencing overall positive affect. As discussed by Fredrickson and colleagues, a background of positive emotions readies people to experience new situations, including paying attention to challenging situations. The contradiction that might be detected between a positive psychology approach and the negative experiences of viewing poverty is not problematic when the sequence of emotional experiences is taken into account and viewed through the lens of the broaden-and-build theory.
A further substantial achievement and one highly relevant to this article has been the strengthening of connections between positive psychology researchers and people working in broad fields concerned with national levels of human well-being (Sen 2000). Arguably, traditional psychologists have been constrained in their connections with other disciplines and where cooperation did exist it was more likely to be in the fields of physiology and psychiatry rather than broader issue-based domains such as social development. Positive psychology is an important corrective to this earlier emphasis as the assessment of such topics as national happiness has now been forged as a joint interest area benefiting from the input of economists, researchers in development, environmentalists, and positive psychologists (Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008). It is this particular development as well as the specific contributions in assessing emotions, understanding character strengths, and better describing the formation of attitudes that provide the principal building blocks for the connections to tourism and development studies, including a consideration of travelers’ reactions to poverty.
Allied Developments in Psychology
Another key consideration in the quest to better understand tourists’ reaction to poverty in the Southern African context lies in examining the very meaning and interpretation of attitude. While the definitions of attitude are precise and universally involve a core evaluative component, the assessment of attitudes is often not in line with contemporary emphases on performative approaches to social interaction (Gergen 1997; Moore 2002).
In brief, a narrow reductionist and conveniently positivist view of attitudes has dominated the way researchers have approached the topic and considered its implications. By reducing the concept of attitudes to tables of means derived from Likert-type scale responses, researchers have lost the dynamic, performative, and communication-dependent character of the concept (Crang 1997; Moore 2002). It can be suggested that the attitudes we hold toward the people and places we visit are not a fixed and standard entity but a shifting, socially negotiated communication highly dependent on to whom we are speaking, the context of the conversation, and the medium used.
It has of course been convenient in psychology and tourism studies to be able to measure attitudes in numerical terms and to use these measures to develop an understanding of the patterns and forces shaping attitude origins and change (cf. Pizam and Mansfeld 2000). This approach has been less effective in stimulating thought about the ways in which people present their attitudes and influence others. It is appropriate therefore to suggest ways in which the existing work can be supplemented. One way to conceive of this more social, communication-linked role of attitudes is to focus on the storytelling of tourists (cf. Woodside, Cruickshank, and Dehuang 2007). The concept of narrative or storytelling can be seen as central to the tourist experience. Stories are effective summaries of the travelers’ experiences that are packaged and delivered to others in discrete units to suit particular time frames and circumstances. Many dynamic attitudes lie entangled within these narratives. Such accounts are distilled values and linked attitudes in the sense that they crystallize and highlight the positive and negative critical incidents that constitute an important part of holiday reporting (Pritchard and Havitz 2005). When seen in this way, attitudes derived from travel experiences are more than sets of evaluative responses to structured question formats but dynamic packages of information that are traded in daily life. And in the contemporary world, the new medium of trade is often the Internet.
Internet Story Telling and the Traveler
The sheer volume of travel stories on the Internet is an impressive testimony to the global appeal of the medium as a way to report travel experiences (Morgan and Watson 2009). In a recent face-to-face survey of 1,500 backpacker travelers in Australia, Pearce, Murphy, and Brymer (2009) provide evidence that 29% of the travelers were using the Internet to create a web log (blog) of their travels. It is not difficult then to see that the volume of contemporary travel stories becomes its own digital library on a massive scale. In fact, the huge numbers of travel stories may in fact dissuade researchers from using the resource for analytical purposes as there are difficult issues to solve in identifying the most insightful or the most representative sources. More positively, a number of authors report that there are several advantages prompting researchers to study Internet travel stories. Schaad (2008), considering the perceptions of Scandinavia in Internet travel accounts, highlights the point that they are open and democratic; both in the sense that anyone with basic computer skills can contribute to their production and to their consumption. Schaad (2008) also suggests that the Internet fosters “an authenticity in the accounts that retain the style, idiosyncracies and biases of the writers while at the same time allowing for the free expression of perceptions without artistic affectation” (p. 201). Langer and Beckman (2005, p. 189) support this view, noting that the possibility to mask one’s identity also allows contributors to describe situations and report reactions to events in an honest fashion, thus avoiding the distortions created by researcher-directed investigative techniques.
One aspect of travel stories that is of particular interest to the present study is the assertion that Internet travel stories can reveal affective responses and intense moments of emotion (Morgan and Watson 2009). These intense moments may not always be the authentic, existential moments in travel time that interest many tourism researchers (de Botton 2002; Cohen 2007) but instead can include stories of traveler confusion, self-doubt, and depression (Hottola 2004). In addition, as White and White (2007) report, the communication of travel stories can be an intimate process as a dominant use of the medium is to connect people in close relationships. Such close and continuing communication, of which travel blogs are a part, reduces the psychological distance between those at home and those who are away. For researchers, the particular attraction of travel blogs to the present interest in travelers’ perception of poverty lies in the ready access to so many natural, unaffected, emotionally laden reactions to poverty as one part of the African experience.
The African Context
Arntzen, Pearce, and Cottrell (2008) argue that all attempts to understand tourism in an African context need to specify carefully which countries are being studied. Furthermore, they argue that travel within the regional destinations of southern Africa, especially Namibia, Mozambique, Botswana, and South Africa, is of particular interest because a large number of tourism packages directed at international visitors are available for this set of countries. These four destinations will be the target destinations and the context for the present work. In the same review of the economic benefits of tourism to Southern Africa, Arntzen, Pearce, and Cottrell further suggest that finding ways to spread the benefits of tourism to alleviate poverty is a key to policy formulation and the future value of tourism to these destinations. One part of the present interest in travelers’ reactions to poverty is to make a preliminary assessment of the ways in which such travel experiences may be benefiting communities. More powerfully, it might be possible in investigating travelers’ accounts to detect ways in which the design of future tourism and policy imperatives to influence that tourism could be in accord with emerging sets of travelers’ beliefs, values, and character strengths.
It is appropriate at this juncture to define more precisely the use of the expression poverty in this research. Unlike formal definitions of poverty that specify very limited amounts of income per day or per year (Sen 2000), the approach to defining poverty in the present research is the subjective appraisal and use of the term poor and poverty by the travelers (cf. Scheyvens 2001). This use of the term poverty and the related expression poor people are not identical to the term poverty tourism, which can be reserved for the somewhat voyeuristic and planned viewing of sites where people are destitute (Scheyvens 2001, p. 11; Earth Times 2009). Instead, the way the study of poverty and poor people is conceptualized in this research embraces travelers’ experiences of poverty as a component of their African travels. The study thus addresses situations where seeing very poor people may be an unexpected by-product of visiting places or it may result from a planned trip to a community facility such as a children’s home. The focus of the study is not on the experiences of travelers seeking an almost perverse thrill by deliberately traveling to see people living in the most degrading human circumstances. As Bandyopadhyay (2009) and Van Egmond (2007) both indicate, traveler views of the circumstances of others may be driven by vestigial colonial views of Asian and African nations. These considerations are not trivial since the reactions to poverty may in part reflect the self-justification that accompanies a neocolonial view of others as less competent and skilled compared to members of affluent societies. It is also highly likely that traveler definitions of poverty include more people and communities than the application of the term by developmental bodies and agencies.
Study Aims
By linking together these guiding concerns in positive psychology, a dynamic communication-oriented approach to attitudes, the rise of Internet travel stories, and the nature of contact in tourism contexts, it is possible to build a study that is directed by the following logic. The core of the argument being advanced to frame this study is that tourists matter in the context of poverty studies, that new approaches to understanding tourists’ emotions in positive psychology provide contemporary theoretical views of how to understand the value of emotions, and that travelers’ emotional experiences are cast as stories that they record in their Internet accounts. By accessing these accounts and systematically coding them, it is anticipated that in addition to a thorough description, some potential insights and implications for tourist behavior in relation to perceived poverty can be derived. As a first principal aim, this study seeks therefore to identify the relative frequency of the reporting of encounters with poverty in Southern African travel blogs. The second aim of the study is to describe the emotional tone reported about these encounters with a particular attention to the consequences of the encounters for traveler behavior. Implicit in the conceptualization of traveler behavior here is both the internal behavior relating to the individual’s psychological state and feelings as well their actions in responding to the poverty situation applied to the visited community. At a more generic level, a third aim of the study is to explore the applicability and future pathways of studies of this type to the wider discussions of sustainability and the Millennium Development Goals concerned with the agenda of poverty alleviation (UNDP 1997).
Method
Travel Story Selection
The procedure to select the travel stories for this study, like other qualitative research efforts directed at assessing blogs, has to contend with the tension between representativeness and insightfulness (cf. De Crop 2004). The procedure adopted in this study was to undertake a two-step process. First, a diverse and comprehensive corpus of travel stories was identified from the Google search entry “African Travel Stories.” The first and the most comprehensive website identified in this search was www.travelblog.org, and in the Africa section of this site a total of more than 7,000 blogs have been recorded. The four countries that are being studied in this work on Southern Africa had the following number of stories: South Africa, 3,920; Mozambique, 890; Namibia, 678; and Botswana, 417 (June 12, 2009). It was decided to examine 5% of the stories from each of these locations in the first phases of the study and to follow this preliminary examination with more intensive analysis of material most germane to the aims of this study. The basis for the selection of 5% of the stories was to ensure a comprehensive data set, akin to the sample sizes used when representative and random samples are drawn from published marketing studies of travelers’ attitudes and perspectives (Smith 1989; Veal 2000). The 5% selection approach resulted in a total of 297 blogs for initial analysis consisting of 196 from South Africa, 44 from Mozambique, 35 from Namibia, and 22 from Botswana. It was considered that analyzing this many blogs could provide the coverage to make some broad contextual remarks about the role of poverty perception in the total tourist experience for Southern Africa as a region. It was also considered that the samples were sufficiently large to at least incorporate the caution from Arntzen, Pearce, and Cottrell (2008) to ensure that attempts to understand tourism in an African context need to specify carefully which countries are being studied and begin to identify differences among countries. Importantly, a broad sweep of the travel stories was pivotal to the first aim of the research. On the www.travelblog.org site, the most recent travel stories are those accessed first, with the older stories ordered in the sequence of their posting date. The 5% selection process did not simply use the most recent stories but instead the first two stories on each page were chosen until the required numbers of stories were acquired. This meant that the stories studied were submitted from the time period May 21, 2004, to June 12, 2009. Only stories written in English were selected. In the material selected in this first phase of the work, no further stratification or subselection criteria such as the nationality, gender of the traveler, the content of the story, or the valence (positivity or negativity) of the story were employed. It can be noted that wherever possible it is valuable to record these variables in interpreting communication efforts as they have been shown to have some impacts on traveler self-disclosure (Pearce 1991). The large sample was presumed to cover a broad range of cases and influencing factors for initial consideration and screening (Veal 2000).
The second step in the assessment of travel stories in this study was to investigate the specific reactions to people in the stories in order to extract specific poverty-linked accounts where this was identified as a major theme and pivotal part of the story. Thirty-five stories were identified and five categories of reactions to poverty were noted (see subsequent results section). The number of stories assessed in detail was therefore 35, which was sufficient to conform to the intensive nature of qualitative investigation and the concept of saturation (Krueger and Casey 2000). In essence, in this kind of work once the same principal themes and guiding ideas have been established, there is little value in reviewing even more stories because there is a redundancy or saturation in the accounts (Gomm 2004, pp. 209-210).
The sampling tactics and research approach adopted here may be contrasted with the efforts of Woodside, Cruickshank, and Dehuang (2007), who examined travel blogs about Italy, as well as that of Schaad (2008), who investigated the Internet accounts of tourists reporting their travels to Scandinavia. In the study concerning Italian travelers the selection approach used was presented as a purposive sampling to find diverse (positive and negative) stories. In this approach, the goal was not to seek representativeness or generalizability but to concentrate on more iconic or striking examples. Woodside and colleagues analyze six stories in detail. Schaad’s stories were accessed using in turn the keywords Sweden trip, Norway trip, Denmark trip, Iceland trip, and Finland trip. Only stories by private individuals were studied (commercial marketing efforts were excluded), resulting in “nearly two hundred web sites representing travelers from seventeen different countries . . . with the visits mostly undertaken between 1999 and 2005” (2007, p. 202). Within the context of the published article, Schaad cites specific examples from 25 travelers. The present study arguably represents a more structured approach to the Internet travel story sampling since the detailed iconic and striking examples focusing on poverty reactions are framed within the broader context of their frequency and relevance to the larger set of stories in the defined region.
Ethical Issues
The conventional approaches to research ethics that can involve the systematic approval of studies by committees and the use of such tactics as informed consent of the participants are not well attuned to Internet studies. Some travelers use pseudonyms that effectively makes direct contact with them for approval a very difficult or impossible process. Some researchers, for example, Sudweeks and Rafaeli (1995) and Langer and Beckman (2005), argue that the posting of blogs is a public act and can be treated in the same way as other information in the public arena. In this view, no ethical issues are raised when citing blog statements or interpreting actors’ behaviors and experiences. When there is actual participation in the online community such as suggested in some of the foundation work on analyzing online records by Kozinets (2002), it can be suggested that disclosing the researcher’s presence and intentions to community members is required. Interestingly, there is a codicil attached to all the blogs on the www.travelblog.org site. The generalized statement reads as follows: The text and photos of this article remain the copyright of the Author (XXX). Under no circumstances should the photos or text be used without the express permission of the Author (XXX). If you wish to use the text from this article or publish photos, please contact XXX.
Bearing this request in mind, even though its legal power may in fact be limited, the approach adopted in this study was to code all of the selected blogs without requesting permission but when citing specific blogs and using the exact text a request was sent to the author. Only material given permission by the authors is directly cited with the author’s correct names in the results and discussion. A draft copy of the paper was sent to those blog authors who gave such permission. If such permission was not obtained and the material in a travel Internet story was considered to be important to the research, a pseudonym was used and the words of the author were paraphrased in the text. All stories were numbered, and interested parties may contact the researcher for further details and access if required.
Coding the Travel Blogs
The first aim of this study was to identify the relative frequency of the reporting of encounters with poverty in Southern African travel blogs. The 297 blogs together constitute an impressive array of material amounting to more than 1,000 A4 pages of text and photographs. The intent of the first aim of the study required an efficient yet comprehensive way to code the material. A coding scheme was devised as follows. Fifty blogs were read and considered, resulting in a sense of saturation of the themes being reported (Krueger and Casey 2000). That is, is after reviewing these 50 blogs a repetition of themes and content in the stories was apparent. Based on this initial scan of the material, a seven-part coding scheme for the themes in the blogs was constructed. It consisted of the following themes: wildlife; scenery, scenic sights, attractions, and activities; transport experiences; accommodation experiences; food; friends and fellow traveler contacts; and contacts with local people. Those blogs reporting contact with local people were then set aside and a further coding scheme was put in place.
While the first coding scheme was simply an ad hoc construction serving the purpose of sorting the available data, the second scheme was structured according to the existing literature on social contact and group behavior. Following Bales (1950), Argyle, Furnham, and Graham (1981) and associated work on social interaction, Pearce (2005) devised a nine-part scheme to describe how tourists interact with those they meet. In this scheme, the categories varied from describing very positive relationships (e.g., intimate contact) to quite negative outcomes, such as others being competitors and sources of conflict. The focus of the present work was on reactions to poverty so one of the existing categories in the original Pearce scheme, which was described as simply seeing others as background scenery with no direct interaction, was subdivided into viewing poverty and interacting with people seen to be poor. Two researchers were involved in coding all the blogs, and the percentage of matching codes for commonly coded material was 92%.
Results
The coded data relevant to the first aim of establishing the frequency of observations made about local people are represented in Table 1.
Raw Counts and Percentages of Themes in the Traveler Blogs Concerning Southern Africa
Note: Multiple themes in each blog were permitted in the coding.
The second coding scheme used in the study considered the category of local people (including guides) reported in Table 1 and then further coded that material into perceived outcomes of the social interaction. This category scheme is built on other studies of tourists and their social contacts (Pearce 2005, p. 115). The distinctions among the Southern African countries were not preserved at this level of analysis. One hundred and eighty five blogs blogs describing local people in some form were recoded. It was decided to incorporate all these figures together as South African data to preserve the broader view of the contact experiences rather than subdivide these smaller data sources with a 10-point coding scheme. This material is reported in Table 2.
The Multiple Perspectives Tourists Report on the Outcomes of Social Interaction with Local People (Including Guides)
Note: Total for Southern African countries together = 165.
These two tables together address the context for interpreting the travel blogs concerned with poverty as recorded in this detailed analysis of the site www.travelblog.org (African stories). Interpretation and commentary on these tables are reserved for the full Discussion section of this paper.
The next part of the analysis was directed at the second aim of the study where the concern was with the emotional character of these encounters, with a particular attention to the consequences of the encounters for traveler behavior. Five themes were identified from a detailed interpretive consideration of the poverty-linked instances reported in Table 2. It can be noted that a number of stories did not mention poverty directly but the blogs classified in the two categories adjacent to the poverty issues in Table 2 (stranger discomfort and adding atmosphere) were also examined in the category formation process. It is important to report that with the exception of the first theme described below, the remaining four themes are cited in their order of frequency of occurrence. Nevertheless, while the second theme has more instances than the fifth theme, given the smaller numbers that are under consideration, it is perhaps better to view this set of perceptual responses as approximately equally important as outcomes in tourists’ experiences of poverty. The following themes summarize the key findings of the study.
The Disengaged
Only 46% of the travel blogs studied for South Africa and 59% of the travel blogs for Namibia mentioned local people. For Mozambique, local people were mentioned more frequently (80% of cases), with a slightly higher figure being recorded for the blogs describing travels in Botswana (86%). For quite a large number of travelers, the Southern African experience was all about wildlife, adventurous activities, beautiful sights, food, transport, accommodation arrangements, and the social lives of themselves and their companions. The category scoring scheme may slightly overrate the percentage of travelers who are truly indifferent to or disengaged from the people they see, since the general term culture was coded as a part of the label scenery/sights if there was no explicit mention of individual contact or experience. Cultural shows or performances by way of contrast were coded as a part of the mention of local people. Undoubtedly, nearly all travelers do have interactions with local people, even if it is only tourism service personnel, but in the sometimes succinct blogs they write, many do not comment on the personnel involved.
Compartmentalization
In the close assessment of Table 2 and in the subdivision of those people who do mention contact with the local people they perceive to be poor, the authors of the Internet accounts often note the situation and move quickly to other topics. There were emotional reactions here of distaste, disgust, and occasionally indifference.
The Lucky Self
One set of responses prompted by viewing poverty and local people involved a reflection on the traveler’s home society and the travelers’ own affluence. This category frequently used words such as privileged, spoilt, lucky, and eye opening to describe the encounters. Common emotional reactions here were relief and guilt.
Empathy, Sympathy, and the Self
In this kind of response, there was a concern for the well-being of the people with whom the travelers had come into contact. The responses were at times empathic in that travelers thought about what it would be like to live in the ways they were witnessing. At other times, the responses were sympathetic, where a simple external concern for the assessed plight of the local people was to the fore. This group of responses sometimes coexisted with a commentary about one’s own good fortune but was distinguished from that category since a much more explicit awareness and recording of the plight of others was highlighted both in contemplating the locals’ present lives and future prospects. Common emotional reactions here were concern, sadness, and pity.
Corrective Actions
Blog contributors sometimes suggested sources of action and stated that in the future they would act to provide assistance to help alleviate perceived poverty and generally benefit others. The calls to action included expressed desires to undertake volunteer work, avoid destructive sociocultural behaviors, think about their purchasing patterns, donate money or put readers of the travel blog in touch with charities and aid organizations. There was a diverse array of emotional reactions here but they included anger and determination.
The results pertaining to the third aim of this study that was concerned with the relevance of the positive psychology approaches including assessing emotions to the broader considerations in sustainable development issues will be considered as emergent properties of the empirical work. The achievements of the study in relation to this third aim will be discussed and interpreted more fully in the following section.
Discussion
The results of this study provide an array of links and connections to existing studies in tourism, psychology and development. As a first summary point, it is important not to exaggerate the role of the tourist experience in contributing to attitudes toward poverty and development issues. Tribe (2004, 2008) highlights the point that researchers are drawn to the academically complex and intellectually interesting topics in tourism study. A consequence of this bias is that it is easy to underestimate the predominance of the banal, ordinary and mundane issues in tourist behavior and the operation of tourism. As a corrective to this tendency the first aim of the study was to locate the frequency and prevalence of descriptions and reactions to local people within the whole array of tourism interests and concerns. Traveling to Southern Africa certainly produces commentary on the people encountered by 55% of the travelers studied, at least as indicated by their Internet travel stories. Within this subset of interest, 21% then explicitly record some view or reaction to clear instances of poverty or people perceived as poor. Combining these two data points produces an estimate that 11.5% (21% of 55%) of those tourists writing travel stories on the Internet deal with the topic of poverty in Southern Africa in at least a rudimentary way. As already indicated, some deal with the topic in detail and it has strong and powerful emotional and behavioral links for these respondents. The nature of the concerns are somewhat country specific and in the present sample of countries the poverty-linked Internet stories are principally recorded in South Africa and Mozambique. There were high percentages of people-based stories in Namibia and Botswana but these were frequently about friendly local people or cultural visits and security rather than falling into the poverty-related codes reported in Table 2. While the data reported using the 5% sampling technique adhered to in this study did not produce large data sets for all the countries considered, the procedure did achieve a preliminary aim of providing a context for the country-specific poverty concerns.
The links between the reactions observed and existing tourism research are considerable. The category labeled Disengaged summarizes a perspective whereby travelers do not spend any of their Internet texts describing local people and their worlds. This is familiar territory in tourism study. Founding figures in tourism study (Cohen 1972; Young 1973; Smith 1978) identified the notion that tourists travel in an environmental bubble. Contemporary researchers continue to rework this idea referring to a bubble of serenity in some locations where there is a special development of a tourist culture separate from that of the host community and the travelers’ home world (Uriely, Maoz, and Reichel 2009). In the present context, the travel experience provides a special path through the visited destination and, either because of the structure of the travel provided or by their own inclination, the cross-cultural encounters they have are minimal. They are truly disengaged from the local people.
The second grouping of Internet travel writers’ reactions to poverty was labeled Compartmentalization. An example illustrates the responses of travelers identified as belonging to this group. A younger female traveler Shon writes:
22 Oct-we leave South Africa and cross the border eventually into Mozambique. One of the more chaotic border crossings as only Livie and I have visas, it’s a long hot wait while the rest of the guys get their visas and passports stamped. Interesting changes in countryside Poverty is instantly more apparent, scattered single storey houses, villages rather than towns and cities and more chaotic driving. We arrive at the campsite late afternoon to find three extremely cute collie dogs. I’m in my element playing with them sooooo cute. (Story 214)
In a similar vein, Miller observes:
I am in Maputo Mozambique Of course there is the typical African street markets, beggars trash strewn about . . . shoeless children rooting through broken glass to find something of value But I have to say I am becoming accustomed to all of that. Anyway on the way to Durban . . . . (Story 210)
One of the characteristics of the compartmentalization category lies in the quick transition in the blogs between the noting of the poverty and the reporting of another activity. Emotional reactions to the experience are not dwelt upon. This kind of controlled or minimalist reaction has not been reported in other studies of reactions to poverty such as the work done by Van Egmond (2007).
A third group of Internet travel stories has the common theme of travelers focusing on their own emotional reactions. This category fits under a common theme of the lucky self. These reactions often describe feelings of how fortunate travelers feel themselves to be due to the affluence of their own society. Rebekka highlights the contrasts:
Although I’m not ignorant of the fact that people still live like this (and in far worse conditions) in many parts of the world I still feel haunted by the complex mixture of emotions (shame /guilt/gratitude/anger doesn’t really begin to capture it). . . . The contrasts may be unsettling and I have been constantly reminded of how incredibly privileged I am, but South Africa’s beauty is undeniable. I’ve also been struck by how friendly and warm people are here. (Story 223)
For other travelers, the standards of housing or lack of housing, the different living environments and health issues generate stories where the traveler’s emotional reaction is the primary theme. The blogs contain multiple examples of this type and the feelings are often expressed succinctly. Adam and Sarita’s blog is an example:
We visited the apartheid Museum and a few historical landmarks in Soweto which was an eye opener. Leaves you a bit shell shocked. (Story 121)
Similarly Linda writes:
I noticed most of the houses were small and fairly dilapidated, and there were still slums and shantytowns about. It was heartbreaking but fascinating—it finally felt like the real Africa. (Story 214)
In more detail, the same sentiments are expressed by Georgia writing about her visit to a township; her abbreviated story is as follows:
I found myself adding up the cost of my clothing. It felt like a Mastercard commercial with no humour involved—an easy $200—and I started feeling more uncomfortable and guilty, because it is easy to complain about petty things when you have never actually wanted for anything. . . . I didn’t feel right for the rest of the day, and still don’t to tell you the truth. It made me want to do something but made me feel helpless because I know there is little I can do right now. (Story 219)
A fourth kind of response, labeled empathy, sympathy and the self, embraces a concern for the lives and well-being of the people encountered. Such travel blogs speculate on the future health and socioeconomic circumstances of individuals or communities. Such concerns can still coexist with the travelers’ reporting of how they feel but the conceptualization of the viewed communities has moved from viewing them as scenery to a concern with them as people. Often individual cases are cited. The reactions here are a close parallel to the observations of Uriely, Maoz, and Reichel (2009) describing successful Israeli–Arab interaction in the Sinai. Once similarities among the interacting parties are established and names of people are used, the sense of a common humanity reduces stereotyping and promotes engagement. The process though is not always easy to communicate. An example is Kyle’s report:
I want everyone to think I’m having a great time and that everything is OK. Everything is not OK. I am having a problem sharing these stories because unless you experience it, it is impossible to relate to or possibly understand the emotions. Seeing a child beg for money, their future substance abuse and AIDS and only 20% will see adulthood. My heart is big soft and bleeds. (Story 297)
The final category moves beyond empathy to that of stressing corrective actions. These actions may be directed at changing behaviors in one’s own life in the home culture or be specifically oriented toward aid and help in the African context. Kim reports on her feelings after visiting Soweto:
I walked around this “middle class” home and thought how much excess I have. . . . Is life easier and better with all of our trappings, of course, does this mean I will get rid of all my excess things when I go home of course not. By maybe just maybe when I walk in Target and drop those unnecessary things into the cart, I will think about all of those whose basic needs are not covered maybe I will think harder about buying that extra pair of jeans which I don’t really need and think that could provide 4 years worth of schooling for a child. . . . I hope I will anyway. (Story 215)
The reflections on action are sometimes replaced by direct personal action. Talia reports:
I am now at an orphanage and I have been here three weeks. The children are beautiful and have come through unimaginable trials in their young lives. I feel truly blessed to be part of their lives. Not only do I feel as if I belong here but I also feel I am making a great difference every day. (Story 182)
Other travelers attempt to communicate their sense of shock and horror at what they have seen and encourage others to donate to charities, to get involved or simply react as Charles suggests:
I do not expect you will automatically understand but I believe my sharing this with you will indeed spark some anger some pity, some feeling that is not positive but it is necessary to create something positive. (Story 150)
The findings and ultimately any implications arising from this study both for academic analysis and for any actions directed toward benefiting those studied and those observed depend on the value of the Internet reports. A fundamental consideration is exactly who is writing these stories. The Internet travel story writers, at least as sampled in the study are more likely to be women (65%) who are international travelers from Europe, North America, and Australia. They appear to be predominantly in the less than 30 years old category (as assessed by images and story content) and quite frequently they are involved in extended travels, including volunteer tourism experiences. In brief, the Internet stories clearly underrepresent affluent, older, and short-stay tourists. There are almost no domestic African tourists providing these Internet accounts. While the stories vary in length they do have a high face validity or truthfulness. The styles are direct and the expression free flowing. Most appear to have been written quickly and without literary pretence or artifice. These observations support those made by Schaad (2008) that the accounts in general are honest, unaffected, and genuine.
A second consideration lies in contemplating the unrecorded reactions to poverty. There may be a lot more happening in visitors’ psychological states than recorded in the blogs. This view needs to be advanced with caution and certainly warrants the use of other data and a triangulation of sources to explore its accuracy. At the very least, many structured group tour itineraries such as those reported in many of the Internet travel accounts provide travel experiences closely aligned to the pattern of themes assessed in Table 1 (cf. Guerba Experience Africa in Close-Up 2009).
The third and wider aim of this study was to link the empirical work and its interpretation through the emotions expressed to poverty alleviation goals. The study offers some hope for this globally agreed on concern to reduce poverty. Travelers whose Internet stories were recorded in the categories empathy, sympathy and the self, and action oriented appear likely to do something as a consequence of their travels. Volunteering, donating money, and agitating for others to be more concerned are the most frequently mentioned. These are powerful and potentially influential outcomes. The total percentage of all the travelers who fit these two categories is small (a conservative estimate here is less than 5% or below half of the 11.5%). Importantly though, this figure is a small percentage of a large number of people. In the academic world of tourism research, much has been written about sustainability and the effects of traveling to places on environmental conservation attitudes. One possible implication of the present study is that it begins to provide a foundation for more studies concentrating on the outcomes of travel, but on this occasion the arena of interest is the influence of travel on attitudes to people and poverty. The development of this topic area could potentially shape poverty alleviation programs by providing more travelers with ways to convert their emotional reactions into useful behaviors, thus assisting those they see and visit. The behaviors that these significant and powerful emotional reactions may generate include a willingness to donate time for directly assisting poverty projects, the adoption of sponsorship opportunities, the purchasing and promoting of products generated by the work of poor communities, and a more vociferous role in one’s own community about poverty issues. The appeal of possible, practical, and preferred ways to effect this conversion of emotional responses to poverty alleviation behaviors should become the next focus of tourism research in this field. The direction of these further studies offers promise and a truly triple-bottom-line agenda for sustainable tourism and development research.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.