Perceived Competence:

Priest (1992) defined competence as “a combination of skill, knowledge, attitude, behavior, confidence, and experience” (p.128). He concluded the higher competence is, the higher abilities and attitudes are. Bandura (1986) proposed that each person has some self-beliefs that make him/her do a measure of control over his/her thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Competence can also be defined as, according toElliot and Dweck (2005), a quality of effectiveness, ability, sufficiency or success. As Schunk and Pajares (2005) argued, the individuals’ perceptions of themselves and their abilities are necessary elements for the success or failure of an achievement. It should also be mentioned that in earlier years Iso-Ahola et al. (1989) and Priest (1992) asserted that successful experiences increase sense of competence. They concluded that more experiences affect higher perceived competence. Recently, Law, Elliot, and Murayama (2012) argued that “perceived competence represents individuals’ confidence that they have ability or will be able to accomplish the task at hand (p.808)”.

Furthermore, Ewert and Hollenhorst (1989) stated that developing perceived competence through adventure activities leads to the development of experience, skill, knowledge, control, mastery, efficacy, and self-sufficiency which should be interacted by constructs such as fear, anxiety, uncertainty, danger, challenge, and perceived risk. Williams and Balaz (2013) asserted that considering experience as an aspect of competence would increase the tendency to take risk.

However, based on the type of risk, as Lepp and Gibson’s (2008) study clarified, acquired

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competence and knowledge would make participants more not less cautious. According to their studies, more experienced tourists, irrespective of being organized mass tourists or drifters, consider cultural barriers as important risks.

Iso-Ahola (1980) stated that participating in activities that provide high feelings of competence and control are the most enjoyable activities. In other words, people feel more positive while they are able to achieve goals and satisfy their needs (Emmons, Diener, & Larsen, 1986).

Locke (1967) also claimed successful experiences augment good feelings. All these findings show that people who participate in adventure activities expect to feel good about themselves, to have more qualified competence, and achieve more skills during the activities and immediately afterwards. To summarise, Bandura (1986) stated that the basis of all motivations, well-beings, and accomplishments is on the beliefs of an individual rather than what is objectively true.

It was Iso-Ahola and colleague (1989) who were pioneered to classify perceived competence in travel contexts as general perceived competence and specific perceived competence. General perceived competence is “a function of accumulative experiences over the years, not readily influenced by one specific experience, while specific perceived competence refers to a sense of competence specific to a recent experience” (p.34). Therefore Iso-Ahola et al.

concluded that the more experiences one has, likely the higher is his or her general perceived competence. Similarly, a successful specific experience lead to a higher sense of personal competence and consequently higher level of self-esteem. However, since the study was only done among rock climbers, it is unclear whether the results are generalizable to participants in other adventure activities or not.

In contrast, Williams and Balaz (2013) studied perceived competence from behavioral economist perspective. They postulated that variability in perceived competence may cause

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different reactions toward different domains of risk which lead to manage risks differently. They clarified the situation by the following example: “an individual who has a high risk tolerance general trait, may participate in risky forms of tourism but be highly unwilling to take risks with his/her personal savings and investments, reflecting different competences in these two domains”

(p.212). Williams and Balaz also argued that the optimistic view of individuals toward their competences make them choose positive information about their desired destination in respect of tourism risk.

In spite of paucity of research about risk-related competences in tourism, there have been some studies about tourist knowledge. Slevitch and Sharma (2008) proposed the connections between the qualities of information and perceptions of specific types of risks.Pearce and Foster (2007) exclusively studied the learning capacity of backpackers and the related skills and attributes. Wong and Yeh (2009) also argued that despite hesitation in decision making among tourists after perception of risk, knowledge may mediate this effect.

As mentioned earlier, perceived competence was once used as a mediator variable to show the effect of participation in rock climbing on self-esteem (Iso-Ahola et al., 1989). These researchers concluded successful experiences augment sense of specific competence among participants which consequently lead to higher self-esteem. In contrast, used as a moderator variable by Cury et al. (2006), perceived competence in achievement goal orientation contexts did not appear to moderate the relation between achievement goals and the outcome variables and acted as a predictor variable rather than a moderating one. However, in the recently done research by Law and his group (2012), it was documented that perceived competence moderates the degree to which performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals are interrelated.

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Up to now, most of the research related to perceived competence was done to explain individual decision making across different risk domains, but there has been little systematic evaluation of the role of competence in relation to tourism risk. Therefore, apart from the role of mediating or moderating of perceived competence in a tourism-based context, there is still a paucity of research on the nature of individual competences and how these feed into managing risk especially among Canadian backpackers. Moreover, the effect of perceived competence on the level of ego involvement among backpackers have not been researched yet, although ego involvement literature shows that the experienced recreationists get more involved in an activity (Havitz & Dimanche, 1999), there has not been any study specifically about the role of and interrelation between perceived competence and the level of ego involvement among Canadian backpackers to date. Noted, from the time Iso-Ahola and his colleagues (1989) categorized perceived competence to general and specific perceived competence and analyzed each of them separately, there has been no study related to this aspect of perceived competence, therefore, in this study both aspect of general and specific perceived competence were examined to see which one has more influence on ego involvement.