Measuring Adolescents’ Tourism Satisfaction: The Role of Mood and Perceived Parental Style

Abstract

Adolescents have become an attractive market for tourism because they represent a sizeable population segment with an increasing influence on family purchases. There is an urgent need to understand adolescents’ needs, motivations, and role in the tourism industry, particularly the factors that may affect their tourism satisfaction. This study highlights the importance of adolescents’ mood and the style in which they have been parented as under-researched factors affecting young people’s tourism satisfaction. The focus of the study is Ali Sadr cave, a well-known tourist destination for families in Iran. In 2016, questionnaires were distributed to 360 tourists ranging in age from 11 to 18 years. Descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation analysis, and multiple regressions were run on the 354 useable responses. Results showed, firstly, that 60.2% of the respondents had high levels of satisfaction with mean scores above 3.5 for all items. Secondly, the dominant parenting style, as perceived by the adolescents, was authoritative. Finally, there was a significant and positive relationship between authoritative parenting style and positive mood in relation to adolescents’ basic needs satisfaction. Authoritarian parenting style and negative mood had a significant and negative relationship with the satisfaction of all three basic needs, namely autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Permissiveness had a positive relationship with only two of the needs – autonomy and relatedness.