Motivations For Attendance At Notting Hill Festival - Literature review Example

? MOTIVATIONS FOR ATTENDANCE AT NOTTING HILL FESTIVAL Inserts His/Her Inserts Inserts Date: 1. Introduction............................................................................................ 3 1.1. What? ............................................................................................... 3 1.2. Why?................................................................................................ 3 1.3. Who?................................................................................................. 4 1.4. History of Notting Hill......................................................................... 4 1.5. Structure........................................................................................... 5 2. Literature Review.................................................................................... 5 2.1. The concept of Motivation................................................................. 5 2.2. Festival/Carnival Motivation.............................................................. 6 2.3. Theories and Models Related to Attendees Motivations ……………….. 7 3. Research Methodology............................................................................ 11 3.1. Types of research.............................................................................. 11 3.2. Chosen methodology......................................................................... 11 3.3. Data Analysis …………………………………….................................................. 9 3.4. Target population and random sampling............................................. 10 4. Conclusion ……………..................................................................................... 12 5. References ................................................................................................ 13 Introduction 1.1 What? The Notting Hill carnival has been taking place on the last weekend of August each year since 1965. The carnival has become a major London and national event with over a million people attending each year. The carnival began as a way to address hate crime as well as race riots that took place in 1958. Since then, the carnival continues to be an anti-hate crime event endorsing racial harmony and the celebration of differences. The event not only brings together the black community but also tourists and Londoners alike in the biggest street festival in Europe. This study will seek to understand the fundamental magnitudes of motivations for attending the famous Notting Hill Carnival. The study will also try to discover why visitors’ numbers have decreased over the last six years of the Notting Hill Carnival. Finally, the study will analyse whether overcrowding and disruptive behavior has an effect on visitation. This research is important because it will bring awareness and critical understanding for the reason behind tourists or individuals attending the famous ‘hallmark event’; Notting Hill Carnival. Hallmark events is said to be an event that occurs in a town, city or region each year, on a specific date or around a specific time. For instance, Notting Hill Carnival occurs every year on the August bank holiday Sunday and Monday. Richie (1984, p. 2) defines hallmark events as: Major one-time or recurring events of limited duration, developed primarily to enhance awareness, appeal and profitability of a tourism destination in the short term and/or long term. Such events rely for their success on uniqueness, status, or timely significance to create interest and attract attention. Notting Hill is a prime example of a well-known Hallmark event, which is why the study focuses on the key motivational factors for tourists attending the yearly event as well as importance of continuous attendance at the event. 1.2 Why Recent research has focused on visitor motivation and they experience they seek within music festival (Pegg & Patterson, 2010, p. 86). Consequently, not many studies have focused on the motivation for tourist attending carnivals. This is unlucky because festivals and carnivals may be seen as similar events, but in actual facts; they are different as carnivals are more heritage and cultural. Researchers should understand the factors that motivate tourists to visit carnivals instead of always focussing on festivals. Additionally, this research is important as it draw upon a conclusion as to what motivates tourists to visit Notting Hill carnival. This is very important as it will help gain an understanding of the mind of a tourist; why they attend the specific event, how often they attend the event and what they take home from the event, in terms of experience and memories. Marquis and Huston (2009: p.422) suggest that motivation is the force within the individual that influences or directs behaviour. Therefore in the context of any research within motivation, this means that there is a reason or justification behind any individual doing something that would not seem normal or not part of their everyday activities. Hence why the context will help recognize the motivational factors for attending Notting Hill Carnival; whether they were influenced by others or it was directly their idea. Lastly, this research is important as it will help analyse why the numbers of attendees has decreased over the last six years, this is supported by the BBC News (2011). Some may say it could be due to violence that occurs every year at the carnival itself, such as, fighting, stabbing, bottle throwing and many more. Others may say it is due to over-crowding streets where one can’t pass freely or the carnival not being what they ought it to be. All these reasons are why it is important to carry out the relevant research needed to answer the research question and achieve the aims and objectives that were set. 1.3. Who? This research seeks to understand what motivates attendees to visit the Notting Hill festival. The research is will be part of a larger body of studies concentrating on festivals and attendees motivation. The study has a lot of potential for various actors connected to event management. This research can be used by planners to understand the motivation for the festival as well as the actions that they can take to improve the festival. The research can also help attendees understand better why they choose to visit the festival and the environment surrounding their choices. 1.4. History of Notting Hill After World War II Britain experienced a rise in Caribbean immigrants. In the 1950s, the “Teddy Boys”, white working class men, started showing hostility towards black families. The situation was further inflamed by various groups such as the White Defence League and Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement who paraded around urging people to keep Britain white (Ashworth 2000, p.77). In 1958, there was a surge in violent attacks against black people throughout the summer. On 24th August for instance, ten white youths attacked six West Indian men in different incidents. There was also racial unrest during this period in Nottingham that began on 23rd August. The Notting Hill race riots are theorized to have begun on by the assault of Majbritt Morrison, a Swedish sex worker. Morrison had an argument with her Jamaican husband and a group of white men tried to intervene leading to a small fight between the young men and friends of Morrison’s husband. Later that night, a mob of 400 white men began attacking houses of West Indian residents. The attacks, riots and disturbances persisted until 5 September (Ashworth 2000, p.77). In January 1959, the Notting Hill Carnival was started by Claudia Jones as a response to the racial tension that was happening at that time. This first carnival attracted a lot of people despite being held indoors. The carnival was held each year but it was in 1975 when the carnival became a major festival when it was organized by Leslie Palmer and broadcasted by Alex Palmer on BBC Radio London. 1.5. Structure The first part of this paper is the literature review which intends to provide a brief description of existing work in festivals as well as providing the appropriate theories that relates to the research question. Secondly, the research methodology explains how the research is to be conducted by outlined the data that is needed to answer the research question and explaining how the information will be gathered. Furthermore, it will also include the data analysis and how the data intends to be analysed and how that analysis relates to the objective. Lastly, the study will conclude with progress and plans which will help map out the tasks and aims that need to be completed in order to finish the project. 2. Literature Review 2.1 The Concept of Motivation Shuker (2008, p272) describes festivals as a complex cultural festival that involves a mix of music, economics, ritual and pleasure, for both audiences and the performers, and contains both entertainment and promotion. Festivals are forms of cultural festivities containing a particular theme; they involve a community as well as attract visitors (Getz 2005). An important characteristic of festivals is that they bring cultural experiences to the city they are held as well as to their audiences. Some of the important elements of success for festivals are motivation of the attendees as well as the marketing strategies of the organizers. For a long time, motivation has been considered as a crucial subject in event management. Motivation has been described in various forms by different authors. Furnham (1997, p.245) argues that motivation is dual-natured: where it comes from and the effect it has on individuals. Mitchell (1982, p.81) notes that motivation involves those psychological processes that result in arousal, direction and persistence of voluntary actions that are goal oriented. Ryan (1998, p.938) argues that motivation is the willingness to go after an organizational goal with a lot of enthusiasm, simultaneously having the capacity to meet a few individual goals. Nicholson and Pearce (2001, p.449), further note that the study of motivation presents a complex area of study in tourism research. Foxall, Goldsmith and Brown (1998, p.127) explained that consumer motivation research revolves around two issues. The first involves understanding the relationship between motivation and other habits, while the second issue is developing a list of motivation that reveals different types of motives influencing behaviour. Motivation is influenced and affected by various characteristics, for example, individual, cultural, situational and social factors (Mullins, 2005, p.85). When festival planners understand individual needs influencing their attendee’s behaviour, a larger base of audiences would be motivated and as a result, they can aid in motivating attendees to festivals. 2.2 Festival Motivation Thrane (2002, p.281) notes that there exist two diverse lines of festival research have been the main areas of interest for scholars. They involve the economic impact of festivals and the reasons or motive individuals have for attending these festivals. Pearce (2005, p.121) and Snepenger et al. (2006, p.142)carried out studies on festival consumers and found out that attendees’ motivation for attending a festival are statistically related to the expenditure of the festival. A similar research by Crompton and McKay (1997, p.428) found out that festivals are one of the fastest growing leisure business, thus identifying what motivate attendees will help to effectively plan and market the events. Over the past 30 years, studies devoted on visitor motivation have increased as managers seek to capitalize on the growing business offered by festivals. Research on festival motivations not only concentrates on factors that motivate people to attend, it has also been stretched to investigate the relationship between motivations and the demographic profile of the festivals visitors. Other researchers such as Pearce (2005, p.67) have further concentrated on finding out how visitor’ motives for attending the events influence their subsequent expenditure during the events. The reasons for investing efforts into studying the motives of attendees is that it will enable designing special offers for target market segments. Acquiring knowledge about the needs that festivals attendees are seeking to satisfy is a method to monitor their satisfaction with the events. Identifying and prioritizing motives is also an important ingredient in comprehending the attendees’ decision making processes as proposed by Crompton and McKay (1997, p430). Identifying the values and goals that drive the behaviour of attendees helps in planning and marketing of festivals, and better segmentation of the festivals attendees (Bowdin et al. 2006, p.112). 2.3 Theories and Models Related to Attendees Motivations The needs and wants of people are unlimited. Therefore, people satisfy their needs depending on their priorities. Festivals contain both external and internal drives. According to Bowdin et al. (2006, pp.23), external drivers of festivals include family, household influences, opinion formers and reference groups. Internal drivers on the other hand affect the decision making of consumers about the festivals (Iso-Ahola, 1980, pp.62). Internal drivers of motivation include: escape from the routine of daily life, and leaving a status behind as argued by Botha, Crompton and Kim (1999, pp.341). Kim et al. (2006, pp.959) found out that motivations related to family togetherness and socialization to be the strongest in festival attendance. Iso-Ahola (1980, pp.109) described motivation as the internal element that arouses, direct and assimilates the behaviour of a person. Fodness (1994, pp.557) observes that up to now, there is no universally accepted conceptualization of tourist motivation theory. To describe the motivation of tourists and festival attendees, three alternative frameworks have been repeatedly utilized to understand and study individual motives (Crompton and McKay 1997, pp.428). They are: Isa-Hola escape-seeking dichotomy (Iso-Ahola, 1982), the Travel Career Ladder which is based of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Pearce 2005) and the concept of push-pull factors (Crompton 1979; Dann 1981). These theories are all based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory and according to Lee (2000, pp.171), only the design of push-pull motivation has survived empirical verification. Tourist motivational research revolves around two interrelated models, that of fulfilling intrinsic personal and interpersonal rewards and that of the escape seeking dichotomy. Iso-Ahola (1982, pp.258) theory holds that seeking and escaping are the elemental motivation aspects of attendees’ behaviour. He further explains that seeking is the desire to acquire intrinsic rewards through occasions in a complementary environment while escaping is the desire to leave the day-to-day environment behind one self. It is generally agreed that pull factors denote the external forces embodying the destination features, such as, recreation facilities, the attractions and offered services. Push factors on the other hand are the internal forces connected to the needs and wants that motivate a person to select a product or visit a festival, such as the desire for rest or travel. Crompton further recognized nine motives founded upon the push and pull model, which comprises seven push factors and two pull factors. They include escape from a supposed routine environment, evaluation and exploration, prestige, relation, regression, improvement of kinship relationships and expedition of social interaction. The two pull factors include education and novelty for pleasure vacation. Lee (2000, pp.172) also pointed out that the choice for a destination is influenced by diverse push and pull motives. Other researchers have tried to explore the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motives involving push and pull factors. Intrinsic motives include body or physical, mind or neutral, or transpersonal/spiritual factors that motivate attendees to pick a given festival. The extrinsic factors include the factors that embody the destination features that attract an individual to the festival. Many studies focussing on attendees’ motivation have been carried out since the first event motivation study by Ralston and Crompton in 1988. Uysal, Gahan and Martin (1993, p.6) studied the theoretical foundation of event motivation elements and evaluated the variability and stability of these motives across diverse group of people built on Travellers Rest’s County Corn Festival in 1991. The study established twenty four motivational items that led to five motivational aspects: family togetherness, thrills, socialization, event novelty and escape. Backman et al. (1995, pp.21) studying the motivation of travellers demographic features, and activities of festival attendees based on the 1985 pleasure travel survey. He identified twelve motive items leading to five aspects of motivation: external, relaxation, socialization, family and excitement. Variances in motivation aspects according to demographic variables were tested and in some, the variables were different. For example, as festival attendees’ age, excitement as a motivation for travel declines. Single people were found to be more motivated to attend the festival due to excitement than married people. Schneider and Backman (1996, pp.141) also studied uniformity of a motivation scale based on work by Uysal, Gahan and Martin (1993, pp.278) that is regularly used by festival researchers. They studied the factor structure of the scale to find out the underlying aspect of festival motivation. The 23 motivation objects were factor analysed leading to five factor groupings: event novelty, escape, festival atmosphere, socialization and family togetherness. While the importance of motivation factors changed from the previous research, the result matched those from motivation studies carried out in North America. Lee (2000, pp.172) also carried out a comparison study of event management between Asian and Caucasian visitor markets in an Asian environment. The result from the study carried out in Kyongju World Cultural Expo in Korea, revealed that substantial dissimilarities in motivation existed between Japanese and Koreans and other two groups (European and American). The mean figures of motivation revealed that the motivation of Western visitors to attend the Expo was more than that of oriental tourists. Chang (2006, pp.1227) studied tourist and profiled them based upon the demographic characteristics and the motivations using the 28 items scales developed by Crompton and McKay (1997, pp.430). The researcher found out five factors: cultural exploration, socialization, novelty-seeking, festival participation and learning, and equilibrium recovery. Among the factors, the most important in festivals is cultural exploration. Park et al. (2008, pp.165) explored the major elements that attracted tourist to attend the South Beach Wine and Food Festival in Miami, United States. He factor analysed 44 motivational items and found 7 motivational dimensions: meeting celebrities and wine experts, spend time with family, meet new people, and escape from routine life, improving social status, enjoying new food and wine, enjoying the event. Mohr et al. (1993, pp.93) examined a hot air balloon festival and noted that a cluster of motivational subscales existed. In their study, motivation was found out to be a function of the attendees’ types. There was a remarkable difference between first time visitors and repeat visitors with regards to the motivation aspects of event novelty and excitement, and their corresponding level of satisfaction. They found out that those attendees who have never visited other balloon festivals, but were repeat visitors to the hot air balloon festivals displayed remarkable motivation structure. These types of attendees were found to be motivated by the need for excitement with novelty offering very little in terms of motivation. Formica and Uysal (1998, pp.17) carried out a study on an international cultural event, the Spoleto Festival in Italy. They explored the demographic, motivational and behavioural characteristics of the attendees, and six motive factors were identified. Festivals and events offer both negative and positive aspects for the host destination and community. Mathieson and Wall (1982, pp.53) noted that perceived impacts of tourism can be broken down into three categories: social, physical and economic. Smith (2005, pp.117) noted that festivals are a good way of generating revenues for the cities in which they are held. They are also a way of improving the infrastructure such as venues and new facilities. Chwe (1998, pp.52) found out that festivals are a means of providing incentives for the local community to create social cohesion and trust. Yolal, Cetinel and Uysal (2009, pp.281) also noted that festivals are a good way to build social cohesion in the society and that they help build an image in the minds of tourists. While economic studies concentrate on the benefits festivals bring to the destinations, festivals also have negative environmental, cultural and social impacts that arise due to crowding, community displacement, crime and commodification of culture. Barker, Page and Meyer (2002, pp.764) studied the impact of festivals on destination crime rates and found out that the probable impact of crime at festivals is without a doubt based on changes in status of population and opportunities that develop during the tourist season. Although quite a large number of studies on motivation and the social-economic impacts of festivals have been carried out, there is little research on the view of socio-economic influences across different festival goods as part of the same event. 3. Research Methodology 3.1 Type of Research The Notting Hill festival is held in London on the last weekend of August each year. The festival is one of the largest in Europe usually having over a million attendees. The purpose of this study is to find out the different factors of motivation people have towards attend the Noting Hill festival. A descriptive research is the most appropriate and will be the best suited for this research. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, a quantitative measure will be applied. 3.2 Chosen Methodology In this study questionnaires will be used to gather information. The questionnaire will be divided into four parts in order to capture as much details as possible. The first section will comprise of a motivational scale, the second section will be composed of perceived socio-economic befits of the festival, the third section will be overall satisfaction scales, and finally, the demographic information. A self-administrated intercept survey will be carried out to retrieve information. Using previous studies, a list of motivational items will be generated. Motivational scales developed by Uysal et al. (1993, pp.6) and benefits scales will be used in this research. In the motivation section of the survey, a Likert type scale will be utilized to measure the items. This research will seek to answer the question of what motivates attendees to gather for the Notting Hill festival. The hypothesis of this study is that cultural exchange is the main reason that so many people attend the Notting Hill festival. 3.3 Data Analysis This mainly denotes how the collected data will be analysed in order to yield usable information. In this study, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software (SPSS) 2.0 will be used to carry out the appropriate statistical tests. The software will also introduce important findings in order to generalize and offer future recommendations. The research will collect data, feed them into SPSS in order to correlate and draw conclusion and finally analysis of the results against literature. The research shall also consider different demographic characteristics of the attendees. 3.4 Target Population and Sampling In many studies, researchers usually target a specific target audience with which they can gather data. This study will be on the Notting Hall carnival. The study will concentrate on the university students of Bedfordshire. The university population offers a mix of cultural backgrounds that will offer different perspectives on the research question. Random sampling will also be carried out so as to ensure that every demographic group is well represented in the sample size. An important issue in this study is to avoid a biased study but to offer an understanding of the motivation attendees have of visiting Notting Hall festival. A cross sectional study will be utilized in this study. A cross sectional study is a study in which various variables of the sample at one point in order to uncover relationships existing among those variables (Kumar, 2008, pp.10). Cross sectional study is known as descriptive research and can be used to describe characteristics that exist in a particular population. This type of design will be used to as it relates to the research question asked because it primarily relates to the aims and objective. This type of research does not seek to measure the amount of people that visit Notting Hill carnival but seeks to describe and analyse why they do. 4. Conclusion The purpose of this study is to find out the fundamental aspects of motivation as well as the perceived socio-economic impacts of the Noting Hill festival. This study is expected to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about event management. Due to the different characteristics of the attendees, we expect the study to show that the motivation of attendees should be linked with different festival offerings. This paper has reviewed various studies concerning motivation and event attendance. It was found out that the motivation for attending festivals can be best explained by three theories: Iso-Ahola escape-seeking dichotomy (Iso-Ahola, 1982, pp.261), the Travel Career Ladder which is based of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Pearce 2005, pp.46) and the concept of push-pull factors (Crompton 1979, pp.411). 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