Abstract
Academic and professional studies of tourists and tourism both need a sound emic or experiential definition of the tourist role. In this study, a comparison of a number of travel-related roles was conducted using a 100-person student sample, and the data were analyzed with fuzzy set theory and multidimensional scaling analysis. The findings indicated that there were clear and highly interpretible differences among 15 travel-related roles. It was also demonstrated that such an approach to defining the tourist role was useful for understanding previous perspectives in the social science literature on tourism.
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