دانلود رایگان مقاله سنجش رفتار قابل تحمل گردشگری زیست محیطی

Abstract

This study reveals substantial variation in estimates of the proportion of tourists behaving in an environmentally sustainable manner. Results indicate that the variation is explained by (1) definitions of environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour including—or not including—intent to protect the environment and (2) the use of either unprompted open-ended or prompted closed questions. The latter are associated with respondent’s tendencies to respond in a socially desirable way, thus artificially inflating the occurrence of environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour by as much as 74 per cent. Unprompted open-ended questions are not susceptible to social desirability bias. Future studies into environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour should measure actual observed behaviour. If this is not possible, unprompted open-ended approaches are recommended.

Conclusion

Any future attempts at modifying tourist behaviour to be more environmentally friendly require a valid measure of environmentally friendly tourist behaviour. Actual behaviour is the optimal measure, but it is not always possible to measure actual behaviour. For example, it may be necessary to study a wide range of behaviours which cannot all be observed or the behaviour of interest has already occurred, or it may simply be unaffordable to observe the actual behaviour of large number of tourists. The present study sought to contribute to the body of work on environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour—one of the dimensions of sustainability in tourism—by making explicit the substantial variability in estimates of the extent of environmentally sustainable behaviour among tourists and identifying the reasons for the high level of disagreement for the purpose of improving the validity of future research. Key findings resulting from the bibliographical component of the present study include that (1) actual behaviour—the key construct of interest—is rarely measured, (2) a substantial proportion of studies—about one third—are limited to early antecedents of behaviour, such as values and beliefs, which are known not to directly translate into behaviour, (3) another third of studies investigates intentions to behave in an environmentally friendly way which are also known not to directly translate into behaviour, (4) only one third of studies use actual or reported behaviour as the focal construct. Of those, less than half require tourists to display the behaviour with the intent of protecting the environment. Most critically, (5) estimates about environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour resulting from these past studies vary greatly, with between zero and 44% of tourists seen to behave in this way. The variability of findings is due to differences in the definition of environmentally sustainable behaviour as behaviour only, or a combination of behaviour and behavioural intention as well as the answer format used in the empirical research. The bibliographical study leads to the conclusion that—collectively—tourism research to date has failed to develop generalizable knowledge about environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour.