HOLIDAY ATTACHMENT: THE CONSTRUCT AND ITS MEASUREMENT

Given that it is not the individual components constituting a holiday in isolation or in simple additive relationship that determines tourists’ sense of satisfaction with that holiday, the absence of an instrument to capture the effect of the holiday experience in its entirety is but odd. Not only that, the current approach of inferring the whole complex of holiday experience as the simple additive sum of the knowledge of its constituent parts is epistemologically problematic, too. Beginning with a brief inventorying of the current approaches to the measurement of place attachment, which is being used by researchers to assess tourists’ attachment to holiday destinations, the present paper attempts to develop a more holistic instrument, Holiday Attachment, which can comprehensively measure tourists’ attachment with the composite holiday experience. The holiday attachment instrument has successfully demonstrated the essential tests of validity and reliability. The paper is concluded with a brief discussion of the current limitations and the developmental dimensions of the instrument, as well as its implications and potential applications.Holiday attachement; Holiday utility; Holiday identity; Implications of the scale.

The isotope effect in the Hubbard model with local phonons

The isotope effect (IE) in the two-dimensional Hubbard model with Holstein phonons is studied using the dynamical cluster approximation with quantum Monte Carlo. At small electron-phonon (EP) coupling the IE is negligible. For larger EP coupling there is a large and positive IE on the superconducting temperature that decreases with increasing doping. A significant IE also appears in the low-energy density of states, kinetic energy and charge excitation spectrum. A negligible IE is found in the pseudogap and antiferromagnetic (AF) properties at small doping whereas the AF susceptibility at intermediate doping increases with decreasing phonon frequency $\omega_0$. This IE stems from increased polaronic effects with decreasing $\omega_0$. A larger IE at smaller doping occurs due to stronger polaronic effects determined by the interplay of the EP interaction with stronger AF correlations. The IE of the Hubbard-Holstein model exhibits many similarities with the IE measured in cuprate superconductors