Measuring tourism awe for national parks and its management implications: A case study in Qinghai Lake National Park

National parks represent the highest form of recognition and protection afforded to ecosystems at the national level. As iconic and awe-inspiring natural landscapes, they serve as vital settings for eliciting and nurturing tourists' experiences of awe, playing a significant role in fostering pro-environmental values from a spiritual perspective, as well as functioning as a cornerstone of nature education. Understanding the awe experienced by visitors within national parks helps uncover the underlying psychological and spiritual dynamics of the human-environment interaction in these unique contexts. While the measurement of awe has been extensively studied in psychology and validated across diverse cultural settings, there remains a lack of context-specific instruments tailored to tourism settings and the practical needs of China's national park system. This gap impedes the effective integration of emotional measurement with managerial applications, limiting parks' ability to accurately assess visitors' experiential engagement with nature. Grounding our research in the tripartite conceptual model of "Aesthetics-Reason-Belief" dimensions of tourist awe, this study developed and validated a multidimensional scale specific to national park visitors, taking Qinghai Lake National Park as a case area. Following a systematic scale development protocol, a 17-item measurement tool across 3 dimensions was constructed, demonstrating strong reliability, construct validity, and criterion-related validity. The aesthetics includes 7 items, representing visitors' subjective evaluations and perceptions of the extent to which the overall landscape of the national park meets aesthetic standards. The reason includes 6 items, representing the cognitive inspiration that the national park experience provides to visitors. The belief includes 4 items, representing visitors' confidence in the relationship between themselves and nature. By empirically verifying the conceptual framework of tourist awe, this study provides a pioneering effort in unraveling the internal structure of awe in nature-based tourism contexts. The resulting scale offers a quantitative instrument for future research, while simultaneously contributing theoretical insights and practical guidance for enhancing human-land interactions and supporting the educational mission of national parks.