Understanding environmentally responsible behavior of national park visitors: a cross-cultural perspective
Date
2024
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Abstract
Foster environmentally responsible behavior (ERB) among tourists is seen as a practical approach to alleviating human-induced impacts on national parks. In light of the increasingly popularity of national parks and their diverse users around the world, national park practitioners and researchers need to pay closer attention to the cultural influences on tourists' behaviors across cultures. This dissertation introduces a cross-cultural perspective to investigate tourists' environmentally responsible behavior in two national parks in China and US. This dissertation summarizes three studies that are presented as manuscripts suitable for submission to peer-reviewed journals. It begins with an overview of the visitor impacts in national parks in the US and China—two of the largest nature-based tourism market in the world— and the associated theoretical frameworks and models that assess the antecedents of individuals' environmental behavior. We articulate and clarify the theoretical debates and methodological considerations associated with cross-cultural comparative analysis. Chapter II provides a comparative discussion of the national park system between China and the US. It begins with a review of the current state of knowledge of China's protected areas development and the motivation to form a new national park system, followed by a comparison of the management structure, funding mechanism, as well as the visitor and tourism management of the national parks in China and US. Chapter III and IV present two cross-cultural quantitative studies. A review of extant literature shows there are inconsistencies in understanding tourists' environmentally responsible behavior in national parks. In Chapter III, we use multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to examine the measurement invariance of a proposed measures of tourists' environmentally responsible behavior between US and China. The confirmatory factor analysis assessments of equivalent structure, factor loading pattern, and intercepts between samples revealed that the ERB is a multi-dimensional construct and can be examined across cultures. Further, Chapter IV builds upon the previous and investigate how environmental values, attitudes, and norm affect tourists' environmentally responsible behavior intention in national parks between US and China. We discuss the differences and similarities of the patterning of tourists' behavior intention across distinct cultural settings. Chapter V connects these three studies and subsequently discuss theoretical and practical implications. We illustrate how the results can facilitate national park management in developing sound visitor use planning and communication programs to better promote environmentally responsible behavior among tourists. Overall, this dissertation seeks to comprehend the cultural components in the activation of environmentally responsible behavior. Our findings highlight the need of utilizing quantitative cross-cultural comparative perspectives to understand the culturally conditioned behaviors.
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Subject
cross-cultural research
environmentally responsible behavior
parks and recreation
environmental behavior
cross-cultural comparative study
national park