Professor Mindy Myunghee Jeon of the Management Department at Salem State University recently published a chapter titled, “Impacts of Festivals and Events the Case of Salem's Haunted Happenings.” The chapter is published in the book “Festival and Event Tourism Impacts” from Routledge.
The inspiration for the chapter came from Jeon’s earlier research where she had looked at the impact of tourism on an individual level, namely how that tourism affected the quality of life of residents of the city in question, Salem, Massachusetts. The journal article was titled, “Residents’ perceived quality of life in a cultural-heritage tourism destination” published in 2016.
The research explored how residents in Salem perceived the tourism impacts during peak tourism season, specifically, the month of October. Going into the study, Jeon believed that residents would resent the tourists due to the traffic and inconvenience their presence cause, but the data, in fact, proved the opposite. Salem residents loved the tourists, did not mind coping with inconveniences of crowdedness in high tourism season, and were proud of living in such a destination.
So, for the sequential project, Jeon wanted to look at both the economic and the social cost of events like Salem's Haunted Happenings on the community of Salem. The chapter lists both the negative and positive aspects of the Haunted Happening events that take place annually in Salem; and discusses how the City of Salem has been adapting and using what she calls “very smart strategies” to mitigate the negative impacts of the festival on Salem. For instance, the City of Salem has been integrating environmentally friendly options and green-oriented practices into the events.
For her current research, Jeon is working on two separate projects and a paper under the final review about employee attachment and corporate social responsibility. The first study investigates the role of Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) during the COVID-19 pandemic, not just in the Salem area but across the United States. The study looks at how directors and CEOs of DMOs perceive their roles, and how they were able to help or intervene on behalf of local hospitality/tourism businesses and organizations during the time of COVID-19. The project is collaborative, and there are three other researchers from Kent State University and the University of South Carolina are working with Jeon. The team sent out a survey questionnaire to more than 650 CEOs and received 127 responses, taking almost three months to collect the data, which is under analysis to be submitted to an academic journal in the tourism discipline.
The other project that Jeon is currently working on is about the behaviors of individuals who attended any small social lifecycle event(s) from the perspective of the impact of tolerable risks on the trends of individuals’ behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This study is also a collaborative work, and Jeon has partnered as a lead author with both Professor Coleman and Professor Colina at Salem State University as well as Professor Robson of Endicott College. This study is also in the analysis stage aimed to be completed for a journal submission before it gets busy for the fall semester.
Jeon says that her passion is really about tourism and hospitality, where her research publications are mostly focused on this discipline, and while she believes there is a lot of writing about the history of Salem (especially regarding the witch trials) but she feels there is a need for more research on the hospitality and tourism aspect of Salem. She hopes to continue to research and publish in that field.
Jeon says that the City of Salem has a lot to offer as the heart of tourism in the North Shore of Massachusetts. She hopes that potential visitors understand Salem is not just a place to visit for Halloween in October. Instead, it is a holistic cultural-heritage tourism destination—where one can dive into countless touristic experiences—offering rich history, literary pilgrimage, classic architectures, museums, modern and classic theatrical arts, a wide range of dining choices, street performances, geographic attractiveness situated in the scenic Atlantic coastal lines, and more.