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Abstract
Nature-based tourism provides an ideal context for motivating pro-environmental action, as it draws travellers interested in the natural world and showcases unique, and often threatened, environments. This study examines efforts to motivate environmentally related behaviour in tourists' everyday lives using a technology-based intervention following an elephant seal viewing tour at California's Año Nuevo State Park. A total of 362 visitors completed pre-tour and post-tour surveys, with 94 visitors completing a final survey three months after the tour. We found that, although the intervention had little influence on conservation action overall, it was effective for a social media-related action. Post-tour conservation actions were significantly affected by emotional connection to wildlife during the tour and repeat visitation to either the same or another state park. We found that visitors' connectedness to nature increased during the three-hour tour, but returned to pre-visit levels three months later. Practical implications include that parks should encourage repeat visits, suggest an assortment of other experiences that support connecting to nature, and link their conservation messaging to visitors' close, personal, and emotional experiences with fauna. We suggest that one simple, yet effective, way to do this is through maintaining the visitor–park experience through a social media community.
利用网络和移动技术去激励自然旅游环保行动
自然旅游提供了有利于激励环保行动的理想环境，因为它吸引感兴趣自然世界的游客，并展示了独特的且经常受到威胁的环境。本研究探讨了利用技术为基础的干预激励游客在日常生活环境中与保护环境相关的行为，并叙述了加州阿诺努耶佛州立公园海象观赏之旅的调查。共有362人次完成了旅游前后的调查，有94人次完成了巡演三个月后的最终调查。我们发现，虽然总体来说干预对保护行动的影响不大，但这仍然对社交媒体相关行动是有效的。游览之后的保护行动被游览期间的情感联结和对相同或其他国家公园野生动物的重复探视显著影响着。我们发现，游客与自然的连结性在三个小时的旅程内就增加了，但在三个月后回到游览前访问的水平。实践显示，公园应鼓励重复访问，建议的其他方面的经验分类以支持与自然连结，及其保护的消息关联到访客周围、与动物个人的和情感的体验。我们建议一个简单而有效的方法来做到这一点是通过社交媒体社区维持访问者公园体验。
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Año Nuevo State Park rangers and docents for their time and support of this project. We also thank the team of Stanford University undergraduate research assistants for help with data collection. We are grateful to the following colleagues, who provided advice on the overall study design: Albert Bandura, John Falk, B.J. Fogg, Wes Schultz, and Ewart Thomas. We appreciate the assistance of Kathryn Hayes and Carly Sponarski, who advised on analyses, and Chandana Rao who assisted with initial literature reviews.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplemental data
Supplementary information associated with this article can be accessed here.
Notes
1. A title used in the United States for people who serve as guides, facilitators, and educators in museums, heritage sites, and parks, usually on a voluntary basis.
2. We did not create evenly sized control and experimental groups, as we wished to employ the persuasive messaging intervention with as many participants as possible. In this case, 20% of the entire sample was randomly assigned to the control group.
3. Two additional action-related knowledge items were eliminated from analysis, as their reliability index was low.
4. For all scales, pre-survey reliability is reported, except for the case of Visitor Experience, which was only measured in the post-tour survey.
5. Research shows that people develop their interests or fluency in a topic or skill through “learning ecologies”, a variety of contexts (such as tourism, museums, school, work, peers, virtual spaces) that offer occasions for learning (Barron, Citation2006; Falk & Dierking, Citation2012).
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Notes on contributors
Mele Wheaton
Mele Wheaton is a social science research associate in the Graduate School of Education and Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research interests include nature-based tourism, environmental education, and informal science education.
Nicole M. Ardoin
Nicole Ardoin is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education and Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research focuses on sense of place and stewardship behaviour in a range of environments, including parks and protected areas, museums, and other informal and community-based settings.
Carter Hunt
Carter Hunt is an assistant professor of Recreation, Park and Tourism Management in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State University. During this research, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. His research explores tourism in Latin America as a means of supporting conservation and sustainable development.
Janel S. Schuh
Janel Schuh was a postdoctoral fellow in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and Woods Institute for the Environment during this study. Her research focuses on how media, conversation, and other forms of communication promote pro-social change.
Matthew Kresse
Matthew Kresse is co-founder of Mist Labs, a company building smart home products that save water. During this research he was a designer with the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and with Toyota ITC. He focuses on finding ways to promote pro-environmental behaviours using information technology.
Claire Menke
Claire Menke is an experience researcher with Udemy, an educational technology firm. She was a social science researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University during this research. Her goal is to find successful ways of conserving unique ecosystems while maintaining economic viability for local communities.
William Durham
William Durham is Bing Professor in Human Biology and Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. His research includes a focus on ecotourism as an example of the challenges to sustainable development.