The Measurement of Emotions Elicited Within Festival Contexts: A Psychometric Test of a Festival Consumption Emotions (FCE) Scale

Despite the growing number of studies on emotions conducted in tourism contexts, the scales measuring the phenomena have performed poorly, displaying questionable reliability and validity. Building from past work, we developed a Festival Consumption Emotions (FCE) scale capturing festival goers' emotional experiences in situ. Employing on-site and follow-up mixed mode survey procedures, data were collected from visitors to three community-based agricultural-themed festivals. We tested the psychometric properties of the FCE scale using confirmatory factor analysis and explored variation in scale performance among men and women through invariance testing. The study results demonstrated that emotions elicited during respondents' festival experience had four basic elements: love , joy , surprise , and negative . Although no differences were observed in the factorial structure of emotions by gender, the intensity of emotion expressed by men and women differed. Women scored higher than men on measures of positive emotions related to delight and lower on measures of negative emotions (i.e., unhappy and discontented). Based on these findings, we provide some insight on theory related to emotions and guidance for practice.