Predicting residents' pro-environmental behaviors at tourist sites:. The role of awareness of disaster's consequences, values, and place attachment

This research focuses on local residents' self-reported pro-environmental behaviors in the Great jiuzhai Tourism Area, China. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether residents' awareness of disaster's consequences, values and place attachment affect their pro-environmental behaviors based on value-belief-norm theory and theory of place attachment. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were employed to confirm the fitness of the collected data for the model. This research concludes that residents' awareness of disaster's consequences, values and place attachment impact their pro-environmental behaviors positively. It reveals that altruistic values are a more powerful predictor of pro-environmental behaviors compared with egoistic values. Place attachment has a stronger impact on pro-environmental behaviors than the awareness of disaster's consequences and values. Several practical implications were derived from the research findings, which contributes to the policy of tourism management in general and environment management in particular outside the field of tourism sites. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.