How to Promote Ethnic Village Residents' Behavior Participating in Tourism Poverty Alleviation: A Tourism Empowerment Perspective.

Jianchun Yang,Jialian Wang,Xiaohong Xiao,Lei Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02064

Jianchun Yang, Jialian Wang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02064

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Abstract

Local villagers are regarded as the main part of tourism development in the ethnic village, their participation in tourism poverty alleviation has a vital impact on sustainable tourism development and poverty reduction. Based on the planned behavior theory and capacity approach theory, we investigated the influence of tourism empowerment on ethnic village residents’ behavior participating in tourism poverty alleviation, especially focusing on the mediating effect of participation willingness and the moderating effect of participation ability. We took Zenlei Village in Sandu County of Guizhou Province in China as research subjects and analyzed 239 valid samples through the structural equation model and hierarchical regression. The results indicate that: (a) Tourism empowerment has a remarkable positive effect on participation behavior. (b) Participation willingness plays a partial mediating role between tourism empowerment and participation behavior. (c) Participation ability positively moderates the positive relationships between tourism economic empowerment, tourism psychological empowerment, and participation willingness. That is, the positive relationships between tourism economic empowerment, tourism psychological empowerment, and participation willingness would be stronger when villagers have higher participation ability. Whereas, participation ability has not yet played a moderating role between tourism social empowerment, tourism political empowerment, and participation willingness.

Highlights

Tourism is characterized by high degree of industrial correlation, low threshold of employment, strong comprehensive driving force and great radiation traction, these traits have increasingly highlighted tourism’s role in promoting regional economic development and helping the poor out of poverty, it has become one of the important forms of anti-poverty
We propose the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 3a (H3a): Participation ability positively moderates the relationship between tourism economic empowerment and ethnic village residents’ willingness participating in tourism poverty alleviation
According to the steps proposed by Baron and Kenny (1986), we examined whether participation willingness plays a mediating effect between tourism empowerment and participation behavior

Summary

Introduction

Tourism is characterized by high degree of industrial correlation, low threshold of employment, strong comprehensive driving force and great radiation traction, these traits have increasingly highlighted tourism’s role in promoting regional economic development and helping the poor out of poverty, it has become one of the important forms of anti-poverty. Due to its remote location, inconvenient transportation, low level of social development, less external interference and influence on natural landscape and cultural customs, ethnic villages, poor areas, and areas rich in tourism resources have a high degree of overlap. Ethnic village tourism poverty alleviation cannot be separated from the participation of residents, which is effectively safeguard residents’ rights and interests (Hwang et al, 2012), and help protect the resources and environment (Sebele, 2010) and implement relevant policies on tourism development (Lamberti et al, 2011)

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