Rural tourism is an important means to realize the economic regulation in rural areas. With the prosperous development of rural tourism, the research of rural tourism in China has been attracting increasing attention from government and scholars. The ...
Rural tourism is an important means to realize the economic regulation in rural areas. With the prosperous development of rural tourism, the research of rural tourism in China has been attracting increasing attention from government and scholars. The most important topics in the researches of tourism economy is to recognize the tourists' behavior intention, that the western tourism academia has take tourism behavior and behavior intention as an important field in tourism theoretical research. Since reform and opening up to the outside world, tourism industry has greatly developed especially when referred to rural tourism. Therefore, a study of behavior intention of urban residents which is major participants of rural tourism activities, is of great significance to reveal the general characteristics of rural tourism activities, and expand the rural tourism market in China. In recently, concerns about environmental issues are raised, discussion about the concept of sustainable development is active and the concern of sustainable tourism that is the concept applied the sustainable development to tourism is related. With social discussion about environment, urban residents prefer wildness and rural area to existing tourist destination that means indicates these trends of new tourism patterns.
The main purpose of this study is to predict urban resident's rural tourism behavior intention, based on Extended the Theory of Planned Behavior. At first Ajzen's(1991) the Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB) is based on psychology, but right now it has been applied to tourism marketing to better explain tourists' behavior. But empirical investigation indicated that theory could not individually explain behavior intention perfectly. So it is necessarily to build a more perfect fame to explain it. In existing the Theory of Planned Behavior, the side of tourists' behavior has been emphasized. However, as the tourists' emotions become important, emotions attained by tourism experience to anticipate tourists' behavior have had a high attention. Based on the demand of theoretical innovation and empirical instruction for rural tourism behavior, this study establishes model of Extended Theory of Planned Behavior(ETPB) to explain the theoretical frame of rural tourism behavior intention by exerting economics. This study consisted of the below parts: Firstly developed the Theory of Planned Behavior, which consists of all the factors of rural tourism behavior intention. Secondly, the questionnaire about the factors of behavior intention is determined on the basis of literature review, and the data is also collected subsequently. Thirdly, this study tests the Extended Theory of Planned Behavior model and hypothesis of rural tourism behavior intention mechanism and draws a conclusion.
This study did actual-proof research based on document researches and consisted of a formal survey. This survey was based on the findings of 850 valid questionnaires collected by tourists to rural tourism from November 1 to December 1, 2010. The research model for the actual research schematized a hypothetic construct and set the hypothesis. It was statistically analyzed using SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 18.0.
The conclusion of this study is: (1) after examining relationship among antecedent variables, relevant variables and consequent variables, most of relationships among constructs of TPB were statistically significant and positively. That's means China's urban resident tourists' behavior intention is affected by attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control. (2) by exploring relationships among constructs of ETPB, which motivation is added. Except perceived behavioral control, All the explanatory variables(subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, motivation) had statistically significant explaining behavioral intention. Although the perceived behavioral control has no direct influence behavior intention, but we still could found the indirect effect of attitude through motivation to behavior intention. (3) to compare the difference between characteristics (constructs of ETPB) on urban resident tourists of groups segmented by environmental involvement level.