Keywords

Association meeting, meeting attendee, conference, sense of community, meeting satisfaction, future intentions, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling

Abstract

Over the past decade, many studies have provided some understanding on what influences association members‟ decision to attend a meeting; however, more systematic and theoretical research is necessary. The decision making process of attendees is a complicated human behavior practice. The major contribution of this study is adopting the sense of community (SOC) model from psychology to gain a better understanding of the attendee behavior. By doing so, this study will add a theoretical foundation to the existing research in the meeting industry. Also, this study will contribute to the SOC research in psychology by applying the concept to a different setting. This study investigates whether annual conferences build a SOC among association members. First, the SOC of association members at the conference will be analyzed. Second, the influence of SOC on members‟ satisfaction with the conference will be studied. Lastly, the direct and indirect relationship between SOC and future intentions (i.e., return to next meeting, membership renewal, and membership recommendation) will be examined. Data was collected through an intercept survey approach at three annual conferences of national/international associations. The questionnaire consisted of four sections: sense of community, satisfaction with the conference, future intentions, and member profile. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the factor structure and structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships, and Spearman‟s rank order correlation was used to see the strength of the relationship between respondent characteristics and sense of community. The results showed that sense of community was a strong predictor of future iv intentions. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed in the final chapter.

Notes

If this is your thesis or dissertation, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu

Graduation Date

2012

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Breiter, Deborah

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Education and Human Performance

Degree Program

Education; Hospitality Education

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0004543

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0004543

Language

English

Release Date

December 2012

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Location

Rosen College of Hospitality Management

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Education, Education -- Dissertations, Academic

Download

Share

COinS