Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an extensive deterioration of many industries including the global tourism industry. There has been a strong need for psychology-informed research on tourism that investigates the impact and implications of the pandemic. This chapter is based on a qualitative study that included 60 individuals, recruited through snowball sampling method, 10 females and 10 males from three age groups. Participants were sent an online survey, querying their feelings and thoughts regarding tourism during and after the pandemic, to investigate the psychosocial impact of the pandemic on the population's tourism-related representations, decisions, and emotions. The data was subjected to thematic analysis that would reflect the social representations of the participants and the effects of the pandemic on these representations. Findings were discussed from social and clinical psychology perspectives, particularly via Maslow's and Fiske's theories and the discursive psychology perspective that aim to unfold decision-making processes and motivation underlying human actions.
TopIntroduction
The COVID-19 pandemic, as one of the most impactful crises, has affected people of all nations, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds all around the world (Shanafelt, Ripp, & Trockel, 2020). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it all started with cases of pneumonia that were detected in Wuhan City in December 2019 and in a couple of days, WHO was informed of a total of 44 patients with the same diagnosis. Authorities traced the virus back to a seafood market in Wuhan City and China made critical information public regarding the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus as well as a series of protocols in January. The outbreak that erupted from China unfolded quickly as several other countries reported their first cases of novel coronavirus in January 2020 (WHO, 2020a). WHO declared that the world was facing a pandemic on 11 March 2020, noting that this was the very first pandemic that a coronavirus has led to. Some were satisfied with this clarification while others complained that the declaration came later than expected and that this delay increased the public confusion and aggravated angst across the world. Hall, Scott, and Gossling (2020, p.578) noted that “unfortunately, controversy over the definition of a pandemic and previous national and international responses and criticisms is arguably why there was possibly a delay in the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring COVID-19 as a pandemic” (Buranyi, 2020 as cited in Hall et al., 2020). Nevertheless, in January 2021, WHO reported over 93 million COVID-19 cases and over 2 million deaths across the globe in one year (WHO, 2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Representations: Social representations are the cognitive structures consisting of the cultural values, images and meanings that are assimilated and accommodated to the individuals’ experiences.
Clinical Psychology: The branch of psychology that is concerned with understanding, prevention, assessment, diagnosis and treatment of emotional, mental and behavioral issues. Clinical psychologists serve individuals from various socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds and from different age groups experiencing a wide range of psychological difficulties.
Interpretative Repertoires: Interpretative repertoires define the patterned ways of evaluating actions and events, social rights and duties, and positions that define the dynamic roles and relations attached to social membership categories.
Thematic Analysis: A qualitative technique based upon the collection of individual (interview or questionnaire) data or focus group discussions that are recorded, transcribed and coded into themes for the interpretation of subjects’ representations, values, and perspectives.
Pandemic: It refers to a global issue in which a disease quickly spreads across various countries, affecting a large area and a high number of individuals. The COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent pandemic the world faced which affected numerous countries and people all over the globe.
Fiske’s Model: Fiske’s well-known model suggests that an individual typically is a “cognitive miser” under regular conditions unless he/she faces an unexpected situation. According to this model, when an individual has to deal with a new, unexpected and problematic situation, he/she turns into a “motivated tactician” to navigate through the difficulty that is being faced.
Discursive Psychology: Based on the approach of Potter and Wetherell that accepts peoples’ representations as constructed in collective interaction.
Snowball Sampling: It is a sampling technique in which research participants recruit other potential participants.
Social Psychology: The branch of psychology that adopts scientific methods to analyze, understand and explain human behavior. Social psychology is concerned with individual as well as group behavior and focuses on the social and cultural context that behavior occurs.
Hierarchy of Needs: Maslow’s well-known theory of hierarchy of needs is still one of the most widely known and accepted theories in the field of psychology. It aims to explain why individuals tend to act the way they do and it proposes that people have several needs and they tend to satisfy their most basic needs such as safety and security related needs before they can move on to more complicated needs such as self-actualization.