Understanding and interpreting war heritage: The effect of visitors' national identity on flow and emotional experience

Information and communication technologies are used in the tourist sector to update and transform museums, providing visitors with diverse experiences. Technological equipment that impacts visitor experiences is utilized in the Çanakkale Epic Presentation Center, which is among the limited war museums in our country. No research has explored the connection between national identity, tourist experience, and flow state in battlefield tourism, despite existing studies on these topics separately. No study in the national tourism literature has determined the national identity levels of travelers engaging in battlefield tourism. The thesis aims to investigate how the national identification of visitors to war museums influences their flow and emotional experience. The thesis used the survey technique to gather primary data. Face-to-face questionnaires were gathered from 470 local visitors who finished their tour. Demographic, descriptive, validity, reliability, normalcy, explanatory factor analysis (EFA), and structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses were conducted on the data set. The analytical results indicated that the dimensions of belonging, identification, and comparison in national identity had a notable impact on flow.