An ecotourist by whose standards? Developing and testing the Ecotourist Identification Scale (EIS)

ABSTRACT

Despite numerous attempts at operationalising ecotourism, none have explicitly incorporated the three tenets of ecotourism (i.e. nature, education, and sustainability) into scale development with the purpose of identifying ecotourists from non-ecotourists. Therefore, we used a combination of Churchill and Rossiter’s scale development frameworks to create the Ecotourist Identification Scale (EIS) as a tool for identifying ecotourists based on these three criteria. We split a sample of 786 U.S. travellers in half to perform a Principal Components Analysis for scale purification on one half followed by a Confirmatory Factor Analysis on the other. Results of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis indicated strong construct reliability for each component of the EIS based on factor loadings above 0.50, reliability coefficients exceeding 0.70, and Average Variance Explained above 50%. Furthermore, we employed Structural Equation Modeling to explore which aspects of ecotourism’s three tenets influence intention to engage in ecotourism by testing the relationship between EIS scale components and ecotourism intention. Results indicate interest in nature and environmental sustainability are significantly related to ecotourism intention while interest in education, socio-cultural sustainability, and economic sustainability are not, indicating discrepancies between the academic definition of ecotourism and the factors driving tourists to engage in ecotourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecotourism
• ecotourists
• sustainable tourism
• scale development
• confirmatory factor analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Adam Landon (Minnesota Department of Natural Resources), Dr. Kyle Woosnam (University of Georgia), and Zachary Russell (University of Georgia) for their helpful comments and edits to the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Beall

Justin Beall is a PhD student within North Carolina State University’s Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management programme. His research is focused on examining various socio-psychological predictors of environmentally relevant behaviour to provide information for promoting behaviour change, improving understanding of the human dimensions of natural resources, and marketing sustainable tourism products.

B. Bynum Boley

Bynum Boley, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor within the University of Georgia's Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management programme. Dr. Boley’s research focuses on sustainable tourism development and how the unique natural and cultural resources of communities can be protected, packaged and marketed to jointly increase sustainability, resident quality of life and a community’s competitiveness as a tourism destination.