Travel during childhood: Children’s perceptions of how contact with host communities influences the socio-emotional dimension of their global citizenship

Existing research exploring the effects of travel on visitors’ sense of global citizenship has neglected to consider the perspectives of children. This represents a significant gap in knowledge, particularly considering the significance of family tourism (Séraphin & Gowreesunkar, 2020) and the importance of childhood as a critical developmental stage for fostering key aspects of global citizenship (Skinner & Meltzoff, 2019). This PhD study begins to address this gap through exploring the core research question: How can contact with host communities during travel influence the socio-emotional dimension of children's sense of global citizenship? The socio-emotional dimension of global citizenship is defined as a “sense of belonging to a common humanity, sharing values and responsibilities, empathy, solidarity and respect for differences and diversity” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 2).

Social constructionism provided the guiding philosophy throughout this study. As such, I recognised that all knowledge claims are socially constructed (Gergen & Gergen, 2012) and I acknowledged the complexity of researching human experiences (Burr, 2015). In addition, I used a child-centred research approach, which recognised children’s rights, agency, and expertise. This approach was supported by a team of youth advisers and a group of experts in child-centred research who informed three key stages of this study: data collection, data analysis, and data dissemination. To align with my social constructionist, child-centred approach, qualitative methods were used involving in-depth, semi-structured interviews.

Following two pilot studies, 60 interviews were conducted involving two interviews each with a total of 30 children. My sample consisted of children aged 11-12 in New Zealand who had travelled internationally in the past five years. Interviews were carried out using Zoom due to Covid-19 restrictions, and involved diverse, interactive activities to build rapport and maintain participant engagement. Interviews were transcribed and analysed alongside fieldwork notes and interview activity data. A six-staged thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2021; Nowell et al., 2017) was used for data analysis, and Nvivo 12 was used as the primary tool to assist with data management. Intergroup contact theory (IGCT), a highly studied theory within social psychology, was used as the primary theoretical framework during later stages of analysis. Ethical considerations were centrally placed throughout the research process with the aim of heeding the call for tourism research to be at the forefront of advancing ethical research with children (Canosa & Graham, 2016).

The findings of this study are presented through addressing three research sub-questions. First, in exploring the question 'What forms of host community contact do children experience when they travel?', I conclude that children’s contact with host communities is diverse, nuanced, and dynamic. I propose a new approach for conceptualising contact with host communities which recognises six Ps involved in contact experiences: Person, Purpose, Place, Participation, Perception, and Period. Second, in exploring the question 'How do these experiences shape children's perceptions of host communities?', I conclude that children’s contact experiences play a formative role in the development of their perceptions of host communities as: kind and helpful, knowledgeable and hard-working, poor, and/or different yet similar. Third, in exploring the question 'How do children view the influence of these experiences in shaping the socio-emotional dimension of their sense of global citizenship?', I conclude that host community contact does not inherently foster global citizenship, but rather can be viewed as a tool to reinforce, shift, and/or transform the socio-emotional dimension of children’s sense of global citizenship. The core theoretical contributions of this study are threefold. First, this study contributes to the visitor-host contact literature through developing a new, more holistic conceptualisation of visitor-host contact that recognises the overlapping themes of Person, Purpose, Place, Participation, Perception, and Period. Second, this study contributes to IGCT by demonstrating the value of a social constructionist application of IGCT in an international tourism setting, especially in terms of acknowledging the significance of context. In doing so, it demonstrates how the forms, moderators, mediators, and effects of intergroup contact may be experienced differently when contact occurs in the outgroup’s own environment. Third, this study contributes to global citizenship research through the development of an integrative framework to expand our understanding of the complex relationship between children’s contact with host communities, their perceptions of host communities, and the socio-emotional dimension of their sense of global citizenship. In addition, this study makes an important methodological contribution. I demonstrate that children experience distinct forms, perceptions, and effects of contact, which are reflective of their stage of development and the positions they occupy within society. As such, this study contributes to the call to “develop a rich understanding of the lived tourism experiences of children” (Canosa et al. 2019, p. 97) and contributes new insights to child-centred tourism research ethics and methods. This study also has implications for families, the tourism industry, educators, and future researchers. In particular, the integrative framework developed from this study can serve as a tool to identify which forms of host community contact during childhood may be more/less conducive to fostering global citizenship. Further, the framework can serve as a foundation for future studies seeking to explore the perspectives of children of different ages and nationalities as well as children living within host communities.