Antecedents for College Students’ Environmentally Responsible Behavior: Implications for Collective Impact and Sustainable Tourism

Abstract

Abstract:With the advent of mass tourism, tourism-related environmental problems are often reported in the news media. Tourists' environmentally responsible behaviors (TERB) are critical for solving tourism environmental problems. This study argues that college students are a critical source of collective impact for tourism sustainability, and examines chained relationships that might determine college student TERB. Five hundred and twenty-five (525) college tourists were surveyed. Structural equation modeling was used to determine the relationships among the variables and the mediating effects. Results confirmed our proposed relationships of chained influences from tourism destination image (as key information) to tourist expectation (as cognition), to perceived quality and value (as experiences), to tourist satisfaction, loyalty, and complaints (as emotional reflection), and finally to TERB. Such results shed light on TERB education and construction, as well as on the collective impact for sustainable tourism.

Determinants and Mechanisms of Tourists’ Environmentally Responsible Behavior: Applying and Extending the Value-Identity-Personal Norm Model in China

“…The 4-item environmental self-efficacy scale was adapted from Strzelecka, Woosnam, and Nisbett [9]. The 4-item tourists' environmentally responsible behavior scale was selected and modified based on Chiu, Lee, and Chen [12] and Pan and Liu [8]. All items of these scales were Sustainability 2019, 11, 3711 5 of 14 originally written in English and translated into Chinese by the researchers.…”

“…Traditional management and regulation strategies essentially presuppose that tourists have negative impacts on the environmental resources of tourist destinations [6]. Nevertheless, many findings indicate that tourists have proactive environmental friendly behaviors during their trips, such as picking up their own litter [7], protecting rare flora and fauna, conserving historic and cultural buildings and statues [8], and volunteering and donating for the sustainable development of tourism destinations [9,10]. These behaviors of tourists are also referred to as Tourists' Environmentally Responsible Behaviors (TERB), which have been described as minimizing environmentally unfriendly activities and displaying a willingness to protect the environment in the context of a tour by Lee, Jan, and Yang [11].…”

“…These behaviors of tourists are also referred to as Tourists' Environmentally Responsible Behaviors (TERB), which have been described as minimizing environmentally unfriendly activities and displaying a willingness to protect the environment in the context of a tour by Lee, Jan, and Yang [11]. The researchers deemed that TERB are critical for the sustainable development of tourist destinations [8,11,12], and that cultivating and guiding TERB can greatly reduce the costs of protecting the environmental resources of tourist destinations [4], thereby coping with the dilemma of the environment in sustainable tourism. Hence, exploring the reasons and mechanisms of TERB has become an important concern for academic researchers.…”

“…Previous studies on the reasons for TERB were mainly divided into three aspects: the tourists' demographic characteristics (including gender, age, education, and income) [13][14][15][16], the tourists' psychological cognitive and emotional factors (e.g., environmental knowledge, environmental commitment, environmental sensitivity, place attachment, and travel experience) [8,[16][17][18][19][20], and situational factors (e.g., social and subjective norms) [7,21,22]. Besides, several theoretical frameworks, such as the theory of reasoned action (TRA) [23,24], the theory of planned behavior (TPB) [7,21,25], the norm activation model (NAM) [22,26], and the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory [27,28], have been used to understand the mechanisms of TERB.…”

Relationship quality and exhibitors’ sustainable willingness to participate in exhibitions: A sociocultural perspective

“…In summary, the data collected in this article are suitable for SEM analysis. From the results of factor load, the values of all variables are between 0.612 and 0.889, which meets the standard of 0.50–0.95 ( Pan and Liu, 2018 ). The combined reliability (CR) of dimensions is between 0.792 and 0.924, which is higher than 0.60 ( Fornell and Larcker, 1981 ), indicating that the measurement structure of this study has good reliability.…”