RESUMO
Improving the level of subjective well-being or happiness is often the primary goal for the government and its policy. Thus, knowing the value of leisure activities in improving the subjective well-being would hugely contribute to the policy-making process. This study explores the impact of participation in leisure activities on individual subjective happiness by applying the well-being valuation method to the national survey data collected in South Korea. Among the five leisure activities, participation in culture and arts, participation in sports, and tourism activities emerged as significant determinants of subjective happiness at the significant level of 0.05. At the individual level, participation in culture and arts exhibited the highest monetary value, while tourism activities have the highest monetary value at the national level, factoring in the total population and the participation rate across the country. These findings confirm the effect of leisure participation in improving subjective well-being and its corresponding monetary value and suggest that government should be appropriately utilizing the leisure policy to increase the frequency and type of leisure participation, thereby enhancing the level of happiness across the society. Results have significant implications for policy makers, practitioners, and academics in the domains of leisure and tourism.
RESUMO
The current pandemic is accelerating the wide-spreading popularity of digital tourism. Given that technology innovation has broadened the horizon of tourist experiences to the realm of virtual environments, this study aims to (re)conceptualize travel experience and develop a theoretical framework to examine media technology effects on virtual travel experience, destination image, and tourists' well-being. As a conceptual work, this study adopts technological perspectives on online travel media to decompose technology attributes and articulate distinctive effects of technology-centric variables. The proposed framework illustrates five propositions that specify and explain the relationships among technology-centric variables (modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability), three groups of moderators (user-centric, content-centric, and situation-centric variables), virtual travel experience, destination image, and psychological wellbeing. By adopting the variable-centered approach to decompose online travel media, this study provides a new theoretical lens to understand the psychological mechanism of media technology effects in digital tourism. The framework will serve as useful methodological guidelines to conduct experiments to investigate the distinctive effect of a particular affordance or a specific technical feature. The potential benefits of digital tourism to enhance tourists' wellbeing are discussed by highlighting the environmentally friendly and inclusive aspects.
