Residents' ecotourism participation behavior mechanism of prohibition zone in Hunan-Guangdong-Jiangxi border:A case study of national scenic area of Dongjiang lake

Abstract

Ecotourism contributes to both environmental conservation and the economy, and has become the optimal choice of prohibited development zone. Local residents are the essential stakeholder groups, and thus their participation behavior plays a key role in ecotourism development. This paper, on the basis of previous findings, constructs an integrative SEM model of ecotourism cognition, attitude, participation intention and participation behavior. The primary data is collected from the residents in the National Scenic Area of Dongjiang Lake, and is analyzed with the aid of the software of SPSS 15.0 and AMOS 7.0. The findings are as follows:(1) The modified model explains 90.7% of the variance in ecotourism participation behavior,showing the strong predictive power of the model;(2) ecotourism cognition cognition has a direct effect on participation behavior with a path coefficient of 0.374;(3) ecotourism has an indirect effect on participation behavior mediated by ecotourism attitude and participation intention. Based on the above conclusions, the approaches to enhancing residents' ecotourism participation are put forward.