Residents’ Support Intentions and Behaviors Regarding Urban Trees Programs: A Structural Equation Modeling-Multi Group Analysis

Abstract

Urban trees are more about people than trees. Urban trees programs need public support and engagement, from the intentions to support to implement actions in supporting the programs. Built upon the theory of planned behavior and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), this study uses Beijing as a case study to investigate how subjective norm (cognition of urban trees), attitude (benefits residents' believe urban trees can provide), and perceived behavioral control (the believed ability of what residents can do) affect intention and its transformation into implemented of supporting action. A total of 800 residents were interviewed in 2016 and asked about their opinion of neighborhood trees, park trees, and historical trees, and analyzed, respectively. The results show that subjective norm has a significant positive effect on intentions pertaining to historical and neighborhood trees. Attitudes influence intentions, but its overall influence is much lower than that of the subjective norm, indicating that residents are more likely to be influenced by external factors. The perceived behavioral control has the strongest effect among the three, suggesting the importance of public participation in strengthening intention. The transformation from intention to behavior seems relatively small, especially regarding neighborhood trees, suggesting that perceptions and participation need to be strengthened.

Understanding Public Intentions to Pay for the Conservation of Urban Trees Using the Extended Theory of Planned Behavior

“…That is, the pay intention for conserving urban trees is influenced the most by residents' belief in their financial resources or capability, secondly by people of importance around them, and lastly by both understanding about urban tree usefulness and attitude to protect urban trees. Former studies point out that perceived behavioral control is the main factor that affects behavioral intention (Wan and Shen, 2015;Zhao et al, 2018). There is also other research suggesting attitude has a relatively small impact on behavioral intention [33,70].…”

“…In the light of considerable research on environmental resource protection, it has been confirmed that those embracing support from families and companions (subjective norms), with a positive attitude (attitude) and believing in one's own ability to participate (perceived behavioral control), were positively and significantly related to behavior intention [18,[22][23][24][25][26]. Therefore, this study hypothesized that residents' subjective norm, attitudes toward conserving urban trees, and perceived behavioral control would have a significant effect on their behavioral intention to pay to conserve urban trees.…”

“…However, stable and consistent provision of diverse tree benefits requires good conservation to sustain healthy urban trees [3,17,18]. Therefore, urban tree management divisions must put into resources like budgets to carry out various tasks conserving urban trees.…”

“…There have been many studies using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) developed by Ajzen [21] or using the extended theory of planned behavior (ETPB) by adding in other constructs to analyze different kinds of behaviors or behavioral intentions to conserve environmental resources. With respect to behaviors, in view that most of the actual work is not performed by any resident without qualified professionalism, related studies on resource conservation initiatives tended to conduct surveys mostly on public support, intentions to participate or to pay for the conservation, or willingness to pay (WTP), such as WTP for protecting water resources [22], pay intention for securing the entertainment benefits of an urban forest [23], WTP for protecting urban green space [24,25], support intention of urban tree programs [18] and intention to participate in protection initiatives for forested watershed areas [26].…”

Millennials’ support for tourism development: the effect of market orientation by governments

“…Regarding items about residents’ attitudes, these were developed from the contributions of Ouyang et al (2017) and Woosnam et al (2018). Finally, for the elaboration of the items on residents’ intention to support (dependent variable), the studies of Bakhsh et al (2018) and Zhao et al (2018) were used.…”