Discovering implicit role of tourists’ perceived distance and emotions in decision-making: combining grounded theory and sentiment analysis

Analysing the attitudes and emotions behind tourists' perceptions of distance provides powerful assistance for destination marketers and scholars. However, there is yet to be a universally adopted scale of tourists' perceived distance. It is hard to effectively extract tourists' attitudes from the distance scale toward a destination. This paper identifies the critical dimensions of perceived distance voiced by 19 Chinese tourists with grounded analysis, an inductive, comparative, and interactive method that effectively captures nuanced information. Advanced techniques for linguistic analysis provide the opportunity to extract emotional meaning from tourists' textual data through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm. The results identify a set of appraisal dimensions as antecedents to perceived distance. With cognitive appraisal theory (CAT), different evaluations on these dimensions provide multiple paths to eliciting emotion change. The findings contrast with previous research in the distance decay model, which noted a single distance involving tourism demand. We also find differences based on demographic segments. Social network analysis helps further identify the relationship between dimensions. We conclude by discussing the study's implications for future studies and practice.