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Home > College of Business > ICHRIE Research Reports > 11 > Iss. 2 (2026)

 

Author ORCID Identifier

Ellee Marsh: https://orcid.org/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

Dr. Mary Olle: https://orcid.org/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

Executive Summary

This research aims to address an educational gap within the event planning community regarding cultural diversity across the wedding industry. As the wedding market within the United States continues to increasingly globalize, planners are encountering couples from a wide variety of cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Understanding and appreciating a wide range of these cultures creates an important baseline of someone else’s background in order to recognize where people are coming from and why they want certain traditions present. Recognizing this lack of cultural knowledge within the wedding planning community, I have developed a cultural wedding handbook that is designed to educate planners on the customs and traditions from ten diverse cultures. Each one of these sections provide a baseline of cultural information that emphasizes key rituals and important traditions to understand the differences across numerous cultures within weddings. The purpose of this handbook is to provide foundational knowledge to help planners approach each cultural wedding with cultural intelligence, confidence, and empathy. Having received Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, this survey has collected information from wedding and event professionals regarding their levels of cultural awareness, understanding of diversity within weddings, and familiarity with various cultural wedding traditions. Participants are asked whether they believe a cultural wedding handbook would be a valuable resource to help them better understand, respect, and incorporate diverse cultural practices into their event planning. The survey aims to gather factual evidence that highlights the existing need for such a resource and supports the hypothesis that there is a general lack of cultural knowledge across the wedding industry.

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