Martial Arts Tourism: Meta-Analysis of Publications from 2005–2020

Abstract

A feature of modern society in the era of cultural globalization is its mobility. One of the manifestations of this social mobility is people spending free time on tourist trips. Tourism, as understood as a sociocultural phenomenon, is a special manifestation of location. In addition to the motives for undertaking trips in martial arts tourism, individual destinations, specific tourism potential and the typology of participants in tourist meetings were analyzed, and individual cases were examined. The research materials were 44 articles published in scientific journals indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOHost databases. Publications, which appeared in the sources discussed between 2005 and mid-2020s were considered. Some periodicals were present in all three of the quoted databases, therefore specific articles were taken into account only once. This study will cover a meta-analysis of martial arts tourism in journals indexed in several major scientific databases. It is related to the phenomenon of tourism of this type, which is discussed from various scientific perspectives. As a research tool, the Atlas.ti program was used (mainly in the qualitative research or analysis of qualitative data), by means of which correlations and dominant items were sought. A comparison with other publications suggests that no similar meta-analysis has so far been performed in relation to the literature devoted to the subject of “martial arts tourism”. Particularly interesting conclusions were identified: (1) there are thematic relations between the destination country, the main destination, and the destination country; (2) martial arts are treated by researchers as both primary, and secondary threads, (3) the difference between travel destinations and types events attended by people interested in martial arts, (4) the variety of event formats plays a role in popularizing the subject of these forms of physical activity, and (5) the number of publications describing specific destinations is not particularly related to specific countries as destinations.