Comparing Residents’ and Tourists’ Emotional Solidarity with One Another : An Extension of Durkheim’s Model

Abstract

This study is the first of its kind to examine residents’ and tourists’ degree of emotional solidarity experienced with one another in a destination—Galveston County, Texas. Two main purposes for this study are (1) to confirm the factor structure of the emotional solidarity scale for both residents and tourists while assessing psychometric properties of reliability and validity and (2) to compare residents’ and tourists’ emotional solidarity (based on resulting factors from confirmatory factor analysis) with one another. Ultimately, the scale produced the same factors (i.e., welcoming nature, emotional closeness, and sympathetic understanding) as in previous studies while exhibiting sound psychometric properties. Significant differences in mean factor scores were found for the factors welcoming nature and emotional closeness across residents and tourists. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are provided.