Parallel Session 5, Impacts of Events and Festivals Track: Is Higher Attendance, the Better?: Examining the Impacts of Meeting Size on Attendees' Psychological Responses and Consequence Behavior

Classroom 207

Is higher attendance, the better? There has been a lack of research in the event literature considering conference size as a factor influencing attendees' experience. Additionally, extant event research has largely centered on cognitive or overt behavioral responses of attendees. While psychological or emotional behavior has been recommended as an essential measure for evaluating customer experience, studies related to psychological responses in the event setting is scarce. With a survey of 470 association conference participants, results this research showed that conference size has an impact on attendees' perceived social anxiety with self-esteem and social identity as moderators. Consequently, attendees' social anxious feelings affect their conference satisfaction and perceived ROI. Theoretically, this research introduced a new influential factor - conference size - to the research of attendee behavior and provided empirical evidence for the impact. Moreover, the findings promote the values of psychological behavioral dimensions in the study of attendee behavior. Social anxiety causes an unfavorable evaluation of a conference. Further, this research advocates for the importance of ROI as an outcome evaluation of conferences. Practically, increasing the attendance of conferences will not hurt the social anxiety feeling of attendees. The higher attendance the industry achieve, the better. It also suggests that strategies need to be developed to release tension at small-scale conferences.