Modeling tourists' environmental behaviors by structural equations: Towards tourism wise development in Birjand

Abstract

Many of the serious today’s environmental problems are, directly or indirectly, caused by humans' irresponsible behavior. The current study, then, aimed at modeling the environmental behavior of tourists in destinations found in Birjand, Iran. The effects of independent constructs such as environmental perception (P), satisfaction (S), attitude (A), and active involvement (AI) on the dependent construct of the environmental behavior (EB) of tourists were investigated. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used via SmartPLS 3 software. According to the results, the reliability of the model, and Cronbach's alpha values of latent and observant variables were acceptable (EB=0.851, P= 0.898, S=0.920, A=0.852, AI= 0.903); the combined reliability (rho or CR) for constructs ranged between 0.874 and 0.931. The average variance extracted (AVE) for EB, P, S, A, and AI were measured at 0.385, 0.555, 0.530, 0.530, and 0.595, respectively. The correlation between latent variables, according to Fornell and Larker method showed that the A and AI constructs were more positively correlated with each other. As a whole, the results showed that perception has a significant and positive effect on the tourists’ environmental behavior in natural and historical destinations. This is while no significant correlation was found between satisfaction, attitude, and active involvement. This research provided a scientific basis for tourism management and offered some suggestions that can be useful for formulating policies, and wise tourism development in the context of environmental protection in relevant administrative departments.