Developing a Structured Framework for Enhanced Experience in KashiVishwanath Dhaam: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Temple experiences are complex and multifaceted, encompassing spiritual, emotional, and social dimensions. Observing, understanding and analyzing these experiences can render important insights to authorities to make devotee journey memorable. There is abundant research done to explore the issues and experiences of devotees separately so there is already a strong background of parameters that influence the journey but no research is done holistically to study pleasant, spiritual encounters and devotee management in different temple spaces. Indeed, all these factors have magnificent capacity to influence cognitive behavior of its users. In a temple these constructs have a twofold role i) is being responsible for visit intentions, rituals, likeliness, temple shrine and precinct experience leading to ii) formation of memories. So, the researchers set out to identify the most dominant indicators of these constructs which would be organized during temple journey to intensify devotee interaction. To validate the efficacy of so formed model, in the temple complex of KashiVishwanath Dhaam, on a sample consisting of 200 devotees (both local & pilgrim) Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was employed. CFA is a technique that yields result for i) fitness of model with respect to data and ii) factor loadings, variance and covariance of the observed parameters. The aim of the study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the individual indicators, through structured questionnaire, that contribute to the complete journey experience categorized under pleasant, spiritual and devotee management constructs. The findings revealed that the questionnaire has substantial validity for evaluation of pleasant journey (PJ) with three-factor model of 12 indicators, spiritual journey (SJ) with four-factor model of 18 indicators and devotee management (DM) with three factor model of 15 indicators. The indicators used for the study are distinct yet interconnected reflecting the complex nature of temple experiences. The study significantly represents a progression in the existing literature that highlights the significant aspects for enhanced temple experiences.