Evaluative images and tourism: The Use of Personal Constructs to describe the Structure of Destination Images

Prior research at the regional scale suggests that two components underlie people’s evaluations of tourist destina-tions: arousing-sleepy and pleasant-unpleasant. A study was undertaken to see if these dimensions also apply at the inter-national and local levels. Although their relevance at the lo-cal level appeared to be masked by individuals ’ personal ex-periences and knowledge, their applicability at the international scale supports the existence of an underlying general schema in environmental evaluation. Tourism researchers have long accepted that the image people have of the world around them has a significant influ-ence on their travel behavior (the real world is too big and too complex to be understood in its entirety) (Boulding 1956). Often known as &dquo;mental maps&dquo; (Downs and Stea 1977), such environmental images are differentiated into two sorts, de-pending on whether the emphasis is on the perceptual and cognitive processing of environmental information or on the evaluations of places. The former are called designative im-ages and focus on the categorization of elements in the land-scape, exemplified by Lynch’s (1960) work on paths, nodes, edges, landmarks, and districts in urban images (Walmsley and Lewis 1993). In contrast, studies of the evaluations that individuals make of places focus on attitudes toward the en-vironment and on the appraisal of different locations. For this reason, they are called appraisive or evaluative images (Po-cock and Hudson 1978). In relation to travel behavior, studies of imagery are probably best developed in the field of tourism. Indeed, the study of destination images is a longstanding area of interes