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Personal Transformation Through Volunteer Tourism: The Evidence of Asian Students

Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research: The Professional Journal of the Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education

Published online on

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the personal development and changes brought about by volunteer tourism among Asian students. This study adopts a qualitative inductive approach to collect data from semistructured interviews with 14 participants, an inductive content analysis to analyze the empirical data, and an interpretive paradigm to explain the results. The main finding of this study is that the participants’ volunteering experiences had certain influence on their academic development, daily life, careers, and choice of future tourism activities. Thirteen themes dealing with changes emerged and could be divided into four groups: (a) inner change, (b) change in view of life and the world, (c) change in learning attitude and future career direction, and (d) change in the choice of future tourism activities.