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Despite its increased recognition among tourism planners and destination governments, a lacuna exists regarding the motivation of diaspora tourists travelling to a destination they regard as an ancestral homeland. Thus, in the current research, we seek to develop and validate a scale that measures the motivations of diaspora tourists. The result of a rigorous seven-stage scale development procedure generates a five-factor structure for diaspora tourists’ motivations. The scale is successfully verified through various reliability and validity tests. This multidimensional scale of diaspora tourist motivations contributes to our understanding of the nature of diaspora tourism.

Growing interest in measurement invariance (MI)/equivalence for nonachievement measures across heterogeneous populations in an international context also demands an examination of current criteria ...

Investigating the structure and assessing the psychometric properties of Likert scales before their application is a prerequisite of scaling theory. However, there are instances in the literature where Likert scales that were developed as a multidimensional measurement of the underlying construct have been applied without first validating their structure and reporting on their reliability. In this paper, to discourage such applications, the required sequence of decisions for such an investigation and assessment based on current theory and practice is demonstrated using the Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire Short-form (PSQ-18), a six-dimensional Likert measurement instrument. Although the findings did not confirm the dimensionality of the PSQ-18, they did provide an overall valid and reliable scale, emphasizing the need of validating its structure before application.

Despite the widespread use of travel websites, our understanding of how best to capture users’ value experiences when using such websites is limited. This article introduces a multidimensional measurement of a user’s value experience on a travel website (e-Value). We then assess the extent to which website users contribute to their own value experience. Based on 175 UK survey respondents, e-Value is formed mainly by cognitive effort, utilitarian value/control, and to a lesser extent by perceptions of emotional value and value for money. Social value experiences do not contribute to e-Value. A user’s own activities on a website (i.e., participation) affect most value dimensions but at different magnitudes. Our findings suggest that website “participation” should be seen as phenomenologically determined by the user as perceived participation affects e-Value dimensions more strongly than actual participation.

This article explores difficulties that arise when culture is factored into the attempt to develop methods for both describing and measuring religiousness or spirituality as variables in health research. The author uses a report titled Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Research published by the John E. Fetzer Institute to raise questions about the extent to which basic ideas associated with the study of Judeo-Christian religions are meaningful in contexts such as Japan, India, or China. Using a combination of ethnographic data from his own fieldwork in Japan and ethnographic literature focused on other cultures, the author argues that as an analytic category “religion” is problematic because basic elements of that category, such as faith or the notion of the transcendent, have been developed in terms of a predominately Christian or Western theological framework that is not necessarily appropriate for research in non-Western cultural contexts.

The purpose of this study is to devise and test a multidimensional measurement model of late life religiosity that is composed of three major components: organizational religiosity, subjective religiosity, and religious beliefs. The religious belief dimension, which has been overlooked frequently in prior research, is assessed in part with items that ask about belief in the Ten Commandments. Alternative ways of specifying the relationships among these dimensions are explored, including first- and second-order factor models. The findings that are derived from estimating these confirmatory factor models are supplemented with additional analyses that examine the differential impact of the religiosity factors on an external criterion measure (i.e., life satisfaction). Throughout, the goal is to provide investigators with a practical approach to evaluating the utility of complex multidimensional factor models of religiosity.