Psychological Empowerment Among Women in Indiana and Illinois Agritourism Initiatives

Empowerment is a framework tourism literature has explored and investigated that has become an essential concept for the field in the last few decades. Much of the works on empowerment in tourism has focused on community-based initiatives, sustainable tourism, and agritourism initiatives, to name a few, which presented different processes from empowerment studies in other disciplines such as community psychology and management. As empowerment develops in tourism literature, little attention has been given to psychological empowerment, an arguably essential dimension of empowerment dating back to earlier empowerment studies. Empowerment in agritourism initiatives has focused on female roles though it has given little attention to a discussion of psychological empowerment. This study intends to explore empowerment processes and psychological empowerment outcomes of female roles in Indiana and Illinois Agritourism initiatives.