62 TOURISM AND ACTIVE LIVING IN LATER LIFE – Contributions by Jiaying Lyu
62 TOURISM AND ACTIVE LIVING IN LATER LIFE – Contributions by Jiaying Lyu
After I got my Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2010, I went back to China to work as an assistant professor at Zhejiang University. In the doctoral study stage, my research was mainly based on the direction of my advisor, which focused on natural resource management issues at national parks and forests. I also published a few academic papers and industry publications on sustainable tourism. When I became an assistant professor, I began to look for new research directions. In China and many countries in the world, seniors comprise an important and steadily growing share of the travel market. As a result, although prior research presented a wide range of topics, marketing-oriented topics (e.g., market segmentation and consumer behavior) still dominate the literature. Given the burgeoning movement for successful and active aging, I feel that there is still room for more research employing rigorous aging theories and social psychology theories, in order to assess the role of tourism and hospitality in promoting well-being in later life. Therefore, I started to writing research grants on seniors’ travel and leisure needs, behaviors and consequences. I got several national and provincial grants on the topic and published a number of academic papers. I am going to sort out relevant research to write a book on tourism and ageing.
Travel decision-making of seniors
My first contribution to the knowledge on aging and tourism lies in the area of travel decision-making. In reviewing previous research on senior’s travel behavior, I noticed that most studies address the direct relationship between chronological age and potential travel-behaviour outcomes. The use of chronological age as a variable is inadequate to differentiate the travel behaviour of an increasingly diversified senior market. A research gap still exists in the study of potential psychological predictors. One such factor that has rarely been investigated is time perspective, which describes the degree of emphasis we place on our past, the present or the future (Zimbardo, & Boyd, 1999). My research first explored the links between time perspective, outbound-travel motivation and outbound-travel intention using survey data from a sample of Chinese seniors (Lu, Huang, Wang, Schuett, & Hu, 2016). The results showed that present-time perspective and future-time perspective were directly related to travel motivation, and that the associations between present and future perspectives and travel intention were fully mediated by travel motivation. These findings not only highlight the relevance of time-perspective styles to travel research, but also have specific implications for tourism-destination marketers with senior audiences. This research was awarded Second prize of excellent research achievements of National Tourism Administration of China.
Several researchers have determined that the travel constraints of the elderly ar