View article

The purpose of the thesis is to contribute to knowledge in tourism studies by linking fresh concepts from psychology to tourist behaviour studies. The research field is called positive psychology and stems from organised initiatives by mainstream and prominent psychologists since the year 2000. The broad aim of positive psychology is to investigate what makes life worth living and the central preoccupation is with what human happiness means and how it can be measured. The thesis is divided into six chapters. Following an introductory chapter on happiness, a detailed literature review covers key themes of positive psychology, youth travel, cultural tourism, tourist motivation, tourist satisfaction and methodological creativity. Each of the themes is divided into smaller sections in which recent and salient works are discussed. Knowledge gaps related to the overall theme of tourist happiness are identified in the review of these themes. To close the gaps, the thesis then addresses three questions: 1) How can a positive psychology approach to understanding human motivation contribute to a sound theory of tourist motivation? 2) How can flow state methods from positive psychology contribute to a better understanding of tourist satisfaction? 3) How can the answers to the first two questions contribute to a conceptualisation of a happy tourist? Three studies are presented and analysed through a positive psychology lens in chapters 3, 4 and 5 to broadly address these questions. The studies analyse the experiences of a group of Australian study-abroad university students in relation to their travel year in Spain. The first and the last studies were …