Antecedents of national park knowledge in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Over time, national park knowledge has come to constitute the gap between the full social freedom and individual consciousness of the ecological conditions inside a park. While other visitors have a rigorous knowledge of transportation, nature, and culture, some visitors naively enter the area in order to enjoy their tourism rights. Theoretically, our model proposes that national park knowledge can change as a result of knowing about eco-tourist attractions; also, knowledge of public infrastructure and accessibility is strongly correlated to knowledge of what you can and cannot do in the protected area. Eco-tourist attractions include natural resources, cultural attractions, and recreational facilities. The argument is that all the infrastructure is developed around these, as that these are the sources of attraction. Based on the literature, we link these variables with the ecotourism concept, thus positioning our paper as an ecotourism study. A total of 103 questionnaires were returned on the basis of convenience sampling. A satisfying underlying factor structure was confirmed by CFA and EFA, in which four hypotheses were tested. With 103 observations, the model sufficiently met the minimum sample size for SEM. This paper provides some evidence for its cross validity and may inspire more studies in future.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural factors
• cultural factors
• recreational factors
• public infrastructure and accessibility
• national park knowledge
• ecotourism