Diversified Psychological Mechanisms in the Formation of Tourist Destination Attachment

Abstract

Since destination attachment is a new branch in the field of place attachment, studies are lacking on the formation mechanisms of destination attachment. The psychological processes underlying the mechanism have also been ignored. This study adaptively applied the grounded theory to the online travel blogs of Hainan in China, aiming to identify the unique interaction mechanism of psychological dimensions in the formation of a destination attachment. Three different psychological paths were revealed, namely, “cognition→affect→conation,” “conation→cognition→affect,” and “affect→conation→cognition.” The formation of destination attachment was found to be similar to consumer knowledge learning. The problems of paradigm integration and the expansion of the destination attachment source were also considered in this research.