The notion that Indigenous tourism can advance reconciliation contrasts with prevailing 'tourism as industry' discourses. Commodification processes treat tourists as consumers, rather than as visitors to a place, or visitors to the people of a place. How can Indigenous tourism deliver sustainable benefits to the hosts and communities that receive visitors? This study adopts critical Indigenous methodology with constructivist grounded theory, as we source and validate theoretical constructs of sustainability in Indigenous tourism with Aboriginal tourism operators themselves. Three practices emerge, namely hosting, connecting, and sharing. Through hosting, operators set the scene for culturally safe interactions. Through connecting, hosts and tourists recognise their shared humanity. Through sharing, local identities, cultures, and histories are brought to the surface. These three practices of hosting, connecting, and sharing arise from the agency, and thereby reinforce the agency, of Aboriginal tourism operators. In order for Indigenous tourism operators and communities to derive sustainable benefits from receiving visitors, such engagements must be founded on recognition and respect for Indigenous agency. These practices imply reciprocity and point to local understandings of reconciliation, not as an endpoint, but as a practice in the here and now. We argue that this represents a strengths-based model of Indigenous tourism.
Self-connection is composed of three factors: (1) self-awareness, (2) self-acceptance, and (3) self-alignment. Although some promising results suggest that self-connection uniquely contributes to well-being, they have relied on an untested, single-item measure. To advance empirical examination of self-connection and its role in well-being, the current research developed and validated a 12-item Self-Connection Scale (SCS). A total of 1,469 participants were recruited across three studies to examine the SCS and its three underlying components. Using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we found evidence supporting the factor structure and inter-item reliability as well as evidence of construct, concurrent, and incremental validity. Importantly, results from three studies suggest that the SCS is associated with multiple important indicators of health and well-being. The scale also demonstrated incremental validity beyond mindfulness, authenticity, self-concept clarity, self-compassion, and self-acceptance in its association with various mental health and well-being indicators. Thus, the SCS provides a valuable tool to measure and study self-connection and its relationship to well-being and other important psychological outcomes.
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