Matching Items (50)
Description
Humans have traveled since the dawn of humanity over 200,000 years ago. As time progressed and technology increased, so too did human motivations and drivers for travel. This thesis aims to understand these human motivations and drivers, ultimately answering the question, "Why Travel?" To answer this question, this research starts from the earliest of humans, classifying groups of individuals across time into respective buckets based on a similar motivation. In doing so, four traveler segments were identified: the Survivors, the Inventors, the Adventurers, and the Colonists. Each segment describes an era in time of a specific group of humans, each distinctly aligning with a specific reason for travel. In the early 1800s, the advent of commercial travel altered the future of travel. This began with the invention of the locomotive and was followed by the airplane and automobile. With this onset of commercial travel, transportation arrives to its current state in 2018 with a new type of traveler: the Modern Traveler. This is a turning point in the history of travel, as prior to commercial travel, groups of individuals could be grouped under one specific reason. Post commercial travel, human motivations and drivers become diverse and discrete, with no two individuals sharing the same motivations. To further understand this human desire for travel in a modern sense, a survey was administered to uncover these drivers. The findings revealed one broad reason: humans travel for the experience. With this overarching view of travel, five drivers were also apparent. First, humans travel to visit friends and family. Secondly, family vacations are an important factor in the motivation to travel. Third, humans desire the ability to experience a culture different than their own. Fourth, humans are intrigued by new places and can be motivated to travel by the ability to have new experiences. Fifth and finally, rest and relaxation are a key driver in human travel. With a greater understanding as to "why humans travel," and the drivers behind the "experience" individuals seek through travel, such understandings could be used to segment these individuals into distinct traveler profiles. These segments, the Backpacker, the Solo-Traveler, the Groupie, the Cultural Traveler and the Party Lover, were used to better group motivations for travel. One conclusion can be drawn from this research: travel is diverse and so are travelers. One reason cannot define the motivations of a modern traveler, rather today's traveler is bound by multiple. However, segmenting an individual provides valuable insights into their own diverse traveler persona.
ContributorsCheney, Elizabeth Marie (Author) / Eaton, John (Thesis director) / Mokwa, Michael (Committee member) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
International Service Devils (ISD) is a non-profit volunteer program established and run by students at Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus. Since 2013, International Service Devils has volunteered in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and India. This blog, written by Kali Richmond and myself, shares the experience of how we as students are establishing a new volunteer program in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We have described in an entertaining fashion, our entire learning process from the brainstorming and organizing to the results of the trip itself. This includes the struggles that we had to overcome with planning and finances, as well as crediting the people and organizations who helped us along the way to overcome those obstacles. We established 2 volunteer projects as well as completed multiple community analyses for the possibility of starting a school and providing scholarships to deserving children through the Young Dreamer Network. This blog is accompanied by an approximately 15 minute video of footage and photos taken during our time in Vietnam. The video shows both the volunteer aspect as well as some of the cultural experiences that we experienced. The purpose of this documentation is to encourage international service learning as a source of experience and education for University students, and to show plausibility of setting goals similar to ours and being able to achieve them. We hope that our writing can help students get an idea of what it takes to be a leader in international service learning programs, and that our experience can help prove the worth of volunteering abroad. We want to inspire fellow students to travel with the mission to learn from wherever they go and be able to give back to those communities, as this has provided us with immense personal growth and new perspectives on education and culture.
ContributorsChacon, Zari (Co-author) / Richmond, Kali (Co-author) / Oberstein, Bruce (Thesis director) / Ostroski, Tammy (Committee member) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Studying abroad is one of the most transformative experiences in which a college student can participate. Students' ability to travel to a foreign country and immerse themselves in a different culture by attending school and living there for an extended period of time has the potential to change or alter students' perspectives of the world and highlight the importance of cultural diversity. It is important that students are mentally prepared before they commence on this adventure. The experience will only be extolled if the students understand how to participate in cultural engagement as well as feel safe when traveling in their respective country. A Guide to Cultural Engagement & Safety abroad aims to provide a more holistic preparation by presenting information in a different manner to appeal to different types of learning. With this additional preparation on the topics of cultural immersion and safety, students will hopefully be comfortable in their new environment from the beginning and dissipate fears or concerns beforehand. The guide is made up of ten video skits that builds upon existing resources by addressing some of the same topics in new formats as well as introducing new topics with an emphasis on safety, cultural engagement with locals, and cultural norms.
ContributorsBurke, Megan Marie (Author) / Scott, Jacquelyn (Thesis director) / Rausch, Kyle (Committee member) / School of Accountancy (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
I am AZ is the beginning of a personal book project which explores six small town museums around the state of Arizona. They include: Cave Creek Museum (Cave Creek), Rim Country Museum (Payson), Navajo Country Historical Society (Holbrook), Superstition County Museum (Apache Junction), Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum (Bisbee), and The Powell Museum (Page). The document highlights these institutions as valuable assets to the community and state as they preserve the stories and artifacts pertaining to both state and local history. This document includes photos of the institutions, local history stories, and interviews with the directors from each of these museums. There are also descriptions of products that came as a result of this project including: postcards as a mode of relaying information about these places, a digital Arizona museum map to highlight the museums I did visit and keep a list of those I have yet to visit, and the accompanying pop-up exhibition that summarizes each place through photos and stories.
ContributorsSimpson, Jessica Mary (Author) / Sweeney, Gray (Thesis director) / Freeman, Stacey (Committee member) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The creation of a global community, international relationship building, and identity construction through travel has existed for almost every audience in the form of reports from travelers to their native audience. In this paper, I discuss the resolution of how an individual self is formed not solely from self-knowledge and reflection, but instead from a dialectic of themselves as singular beings within communities encountered by traveling. The dialectic model I use is that of "the dialectic of solitude" (Paz, 1985, p. 195) - it is the dialectic needed and enacted when a traveler learns of themselves through communion with all that travel entails - new environments, culture shock, and encounters with novel experiences and people - that all solitary individuals inherently search for. It culminates in the production of a written product, and the need to share their self-development with an audience. Ultimately, travel writing, as the product of the traveler's experience, is the manifestation of, and represents, the dialectic of solitude among individual and cultural identity formation.
ContributorsWinemiller, Carolena (Author) / Graff, Sarah (Thesis director) / Bhattacharjya, Nilanjana (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Rapid developments are occurring in the arena of activity-based microsimulation models. Advances in computational power, econometric methodologies and data collection have all contributed to the development of microsimulation tools for planning applications. There has also been interest in modeling child daily activity-travel patterns and their influence on those of adults in the household using activity-based microsimulation tools. It is conceivable that most of the children are largely dependent on adults for their activity engagement and travel needs and hence would have considerable influence on the activity-travel schedules of adult members in the household. In this context, a detailed comparison of various activity-travel characteristics of adults in households with and without children is made using the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data. The analysis is used to quantify and decipher the nature of the impact of activities of children on the daily activity-travel patterns of adults. It is found that adults in households with children make a significantly higher proportion of high occupancy vehicle (HOV) trips and lower proportion of single occupancy vehicle (SOV) trips when compared to those in households without children. They also engage in more serve passenger activities and fewer personal business, shopping and social activities. A framework for modeling activities and travel of dependent children is proposed. The framework consists of six sub-models to simulate the choice of going to school/pre-school on a travel day, the dependency status of the child, the activity type, the destination, the activity duration, and the joint activity engagement with an accompanying adult. Econometric formulations such as binary probit and multinomial logit are used to obtain behaviorally intuitive models that predict children's activity skeletons. The model framework is tested using a 5% sample of a synthetic population of children for Maricopa County, Arizona and the resulting patterns are validated against those found in NHTS data. Microsimulation of these dependencies of children can be used to constrain the adult daily activity schedules. The deployment of this framework prior to the simulation of adult non-mandatory activities is expected to significantly enhance the representation of the interactions between children and adults in activity-based microsimulation models.
ContributorsSana, Bhargava (Author) / Pendyala, Ram M. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Soyoung (Committee member) / Kaloush, Kamil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
With everything that one achieves in life, without passion and dedication, one might find it difficult to reach the optimal result; this of course most definitely applies to my honor thesis. Prior to diving into the actual marketing pitch, I'll briefly provide support for it, by telling you a little bit about myself, why I chose this particular project, and conclude with my outlook for the future and how it pertains to this campaign.
ContributorsCarrarro, Melanie (Author) / Blasko, Vincent (Thesis director) / Giles, Bret (Committee member) / Gralen, Kevin (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
A Foreigner's Guide to China, a creative project, is a short novel that blends cultural analysis and linguistic study in a collective investigation of modern China. As China grows at an unprecedented pace, many Americans still remain ignorant of life and development in a foreign place on the other side of the world. The project is an attempt to help mesh cultural lines and aid students, travelers, and businesspeople travelling to China for the first time. Therefore, the main goal of the entire project is to provide an actual guidebook that can be read prior to going to China or while in the country. The project is divided into two main types of chapters: cultural analysis and advice giving on day to day life in China, and linguistic study that adopts a more academic approach. Both types of chapters use my personal anecdotes to give both context and a sense of reality to the advice I include in the project. While very different in their styles, the two types of chapters ultimately work towards the same end: explaining differences and similarities between Chinese and American cultures, and giving a cultural opening from which to expand understanding. The novel is written in a lighthearted and humorous tone that attempts to soften the often seemingly offensive overtone that appears when analyzing cultures side by side. Topics include landing advice, transportation, cuisine, working life, and school life, as well as Mandarin Chinese tones, politeness, and dialects. Overall, the project has a more cultural outlook with a heavier focus on those sections.
ContributorsDaliere, Andrew John (Author) / Oh, Young (Thesis director) / Lyon, Mich (Committee member) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Research has examined the many motivations of international volunteers (voluntourists), but there is limited research about how volunteers are reached, as well as differing perceptions between travelers who have and have not traveled before. This study examines the preferences and perspectives of college-age, western backpackers. The general terms "backpacker" and "traveler" are used throughout the paper for simplicity, but it is important to note that these backpackers are specifically from the college-age, western demographic. First, the study addresses which recruitment avenues are the most successful, as well as which avenues could be utilized to increase the number of foreign, short-term volunteers. In addition, this study examines the differences between backpacker perceptions - specifically the differences in potential volunteering motivations and concerns. Data was collected through an anonymous online survey distributed to self-identified travelers between the ages of 18 and 25 in the United States and travel destinations in Vietnam and India. According to traveler responses, personal recommendations and hotels/hostels are important resources when making travel plans. Despite the importance of both resources, personal recommendations drew more travelers to volunteer than hostels/hotels (none of the travelers surveyed learned about their last volunteer opportunity through a hostel), revealing a potential avenue of recruitment. A small number of organizations have reported successfully utilizing the hostel-partnership model, which implies that successful partnerships are possible. Further, potential motivations to volunteer were similar between those who have and those who have not volunteered, however, potential concerns between the two groups differed. Those who had volunteered before reported to be considerably more concerned about adherence to cultural norms, as well as communication barriers, while those who had not volunteered were much more concerned about safety. These findings lead to several theoretical implications for nonprofits with respect to utilizing hostels for volunteer recruitment, as well as addressing concerns of those who have volunteered before differently from those who have not.
ContributorsWorkman, Hunter (Co-author) / Pfeiffer, Nicholaus (Co-author) / Wang, Lili (Thesis director) / Salamone, Damien (Committee member) / Louis, Arulraj (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Abstract: International Service Devils (ISD) is a non-profit volunteer program established and run by students at Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus. Since 2013, International Service Devils has volunteered in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and India. This blog, written by Kali Richmond and myself, shares the experience of how we as students have established a new volunteer program in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We have described in an entertaining fashion, our entire learning process from the brainstorming and organizing, to the results of the trip itself. This includes the struggles that we had to overcome with planning and finances, as well as crediting the people and organizations who helped us along the way to overcome those obstacles. We established 2 volunteer projects as well as completed multiple community analyses for the possibility of starting a school and providing scholarships to deserving children through the Young Dreamer Network. This blog is accompanied by an approximately 15 minute video of footage and photos taken during our time in Vietnam. The video shows both the volunteer aspect as well as some of the cultural experiences that we experienced. The purpose of this documentation is to encourage international service learning as a source of experience and education for University students, and to show plausibility of setting goals similar to ours and being able to achieve them. We hope that our writing can help students get an idea of what it takes to be a leader in international service learning programs, and that our experience can help prove the worth of volunteering abroad. We want to inspire fellow students to travel with the mission to learn from wherever they go and be able to give back to those communities, as this has provided us with immense personal growth and new perspectives on education and culture.
ContributorsChacon, Zari (Co-author) / Richmond, Kali (Co-author) / Oberstein, Bruce (Thesis director) / Ostroski, Tammy (Committee member) / College of Letters and Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05