Ren, RuipingChen, Joseph2024-04-262024-04-262021https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/49247<p>Ruiping Ren is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Leisure Behavior program. Her previous research focused on tourist marketing and tourist flow network structure and has published 19 papers in Chinese. And now she is interested in rural tourism and educational tourism.</p> <p>Joseph Chen is a professor and Ruiping Ren's advisor at Indiana University Bloomington. He has worked there for 17 years. His expertise is in cruise tourism and tourist experience. He has published more than 100 papers that are cited 7735 totally.</p>Educational tourism is considered an emerging segment in the tourism industry. Past studies on educational tourism have focused on five aspects, including conceptualizing educational tourism, educational tourism market, the impacts of educational tourism, the factors influencing educational tourism, and the function of educational tourism. However, there is a lack of research on measuring educational tourist experience, and the previous studies tend to concern the overall or adult educational tourism market and lack school student segment. Since tourist experience significantly impacts tourism satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and loyalty intentions, and the total number of school students is a vast potential market for developing educational tourism, this study aims to develop a school student educational tourism experience scale using mixed methods method including personal interviews and survey research. It expects that the destination managers can utilize the resultant scale to obtain critical information for service delivery.event