Spotlight on Research Streams DR. WEI WANG

Hospitality and tourism research is known as an interdisciplinary field, which incorporates a variety of disciplines in application to the industry. This has shaped Dr. Wang’s research interests and led to an increased exposure to interdisciplinary theories, such as combining marketing and social psychology. Dr. Wang believes strongly that research should be designed and conducted with high rigor, using multi-method, multi-stage, and multi-perspective approaches. In addition, Dr. Wang looks for opportunities to work with student researchers and hopes her involvement can shed light on young scholars and motivate them to build higher research profiles. Dr. Wang’s biggest hope is to “understand global, contemporary tourism issues through rigorous methodology and collaborations to create innovative, state-of-art research works.”

Much of Dr. Wang’s research is interdisciplinary in nature, where she focuses on the connection points between tourism and other fields – including marketing, management, merchandising, sport, and pedagogy. She has coauthors from a variety of fields and with diversified backgrounds and believes that their knowledge and expertise add valuable insights and perspectives to each research study. Two of Dr. Wang’s primary research streams center around tourist behavior and destination and service marketing.

The highlighted project is part of a research stream focusing on tourist behavior. It considers the interplay of hospitality innovation with travelers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions. For this research, Dr. Wang collaborated with marketing colleagues Dr. A. Banu Elmadag Bas and Dr.

Kristina Harrison, along with Dr. Mehmet Okan, assistant professor of marketing at Artvin Coruh University. The research team conducted a qualitative study with two quantitative experiments to fully understand service robots’ interactions with customers when service is perceived negatively. The results of this first study revealed that service technology qualities, customer emotions, and customer service evaluations play vital roles in the service delivery. The research was presented at the Society for Marketing Advances Conference, where it was awarded Best Paper in Track.

In another research stream focusing on destination and service marketing, Dr. Wang works on a project examining how improvement of service provisions in hospitality businesses can create optimal customer experiences. Dr. Wang collaborated with Dr. Gregory Bradley, a management colleague, to develop a casino service quality scale. They used a nine-step multistage research process, incorporating perspectives from 1,000 casino guests, along with feedback from casino managers and executives. Overall, four casino service quality components were identified and validated as a holistic measurement: gaming service, restaurant service, hotel service, and cleanliness. The manuscript was published at a top-tier elite journal, Tourism Management, which has an impact factor of 12.879 and ranks as an A+ level journal (Australian Business Deans Council).