Measuring Tourism e-Microentrepreneurial Self-Efficacy

Tourism is a major economic force in many regions, generating employment, public tax, and foreign exchange, but some researchers insist that local ownership is the most meaningful way to engage local communities in the industry. Until recently, access to tourists depended on formal distribution systems, but webmarketplaces such as People-First Tourism, Etsy, Airbnb, Uber, and Local Harvest now allow microentrepreneurs to showcase products and services to large markets, and more importantly reach customers directly. Despite its ubiquity and millions of adopters around the world, the emerging sharing economy has largely failed to engage under-resourced rural tourism microentrepreneurs in meaningful economic activity, potentially increasing existing socio-economic disparities.

In order to understand the rural tourism microentrepreneur’s involvement with e-commerce, I explored the construct of Tourism e-Microentrepreneurial Self-Efficacy (TeMSE), defined as one’s belief in one’s ability to successfully perform the various roles and tasks of microentrepreneurship in the tourism e-business sector. The purpose of my MS research was to define, conceptualize, and operationalize TeMSE. I created an initial pool of 109 items based on a thorough literature review and field research. Then two panels of experts helped me trim the item pool down to 33 items. I pilot-tested the scale with 109 undergraduate and graduate students, and further polished it with data from a sample of 300 tourism e-microentrepreneurs from the Southeastern U.S. collected with an online survey. Analyses of these data sets led me to a 13-item scale with 5 dimensions (i.e., pursuing innovation; marshaling resources; adapting to externalities; aligning core purpose with self; and e-marketing). Next, I applied the scale by phone to a population of 41 P1t microentrepreneurs, and contrasted the findings with my fieldnotes from two years of working with these microentrepreneurs.

Overall, I found that microentrepreneurs have no problem in providing a good service to visitors but struggle to secure their livelihoods through entrepreneurship. This is because most P1t experiences are offered by aspiring microentrepreneurs who have recently engaged in this activity and have not yet reached a steady demand for their experiences. Hence, I added questions like "I am able to run my tourism business so that I can make the most of my local knowledge" and "I am able to run my tourism business so that I can share the real story of my community," to tap into non-economic motives that are likely to be predominant among early stages of entrepreneurship.

At the conceptual level, I feel that this study tears down walls between disciplines becasue I incorporated literature from tourism studies and entrepreneurship, allowing me to cross-pollinate ideas, methods, and perspectives. I hope that the TeMSE scale will be useful to the study of tourism microentrepreneurship, and that it will be widely used in needs assessments, and in the monitoring of training programs in cooperation with rural development partners in the field.

Full thesis document available online: http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/handle/1840.16/11385

By: Bruno Simoes Ferreira
Doctoral Student Equitable and Sustainable Tourism, NC State
Research Assistant, P1t Lab

This research was supported by a scholarship from the Southeast Travel and Tourism Association