Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
life and tourism circumstances
H.J. Kim & N.J. Kim
Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
K.M. Yoo
Howon University, Jeollabuk-do, Republic of Korea
ABSTRACT: The objectives of the present research were to examine whether there is an inconsistency
in pro-environmental behavior between daily life and tourism circumstance and compare the differences
in such behaviors from the broad perspectives of the costs and benefits. As a national survey, 1,003 sam-
ples obtained through quota sampling, stratified by sex, age, administrative district and education level.
The results are shown in two ways. First, there were significant differences in respondents' PEB between
two settings. Respondents reported a far higher level of PEB in daily life setting than tourism's. Second,
while the economic cost and benefit are key criteria for PEB in daily life, the level of inconvenience is the
key criteria for selecting of PEB in tourism setting. Theoretical implications of inconsistencies in PEB are
discussed, and offer guidelines about how to promote tourists' engagement in PEB in tourism settings as
a managerial implications.
Keywords
:
Pro-Environmental Behavior, cost-benefit, rational choice theory, climate change
1 INTRODUCTION
research can discover the important variables that
can promote PEB of tourists.
Numerous researches attempted to explain the
PEB by setting variables such as the environmental
attitude, value and belief as the independent vari-
ables. However, the relationship between the envi-
ronmental attitude and the behavior is reported to
be rather weak. Researches on the areas of tourism
also failed to explain the reasons for the difficul-
ties in performing the PEB in tourism because they
applied same variables that are generally used to
explain the PEB in other context.
Stern (2000) pointed out that the environmental
behavior has the tendency to comply with some of
the non-environmental motives, that is, to save money
or the preference for personal comforts. However,
majority of the researches failed to provide sufficient
theoretical explanations for the reasons for the incon-
sistency of the environmental attitude and PEB, since
they overlooked non-environmental motives.
This Study attempts to explain PEB from cost
and benefit perspectives that the existing researches
have neglected. More specifically, this Study
empirically verify whether the pro-environmental
behaviors in the daily life carry over to the tour-
ism context, and compare the differences in such
behaviors under the two circumstances from the
broad perspectives of the costs and benefits.
According to the data of UNWTO (2007), tourism
industry is estimated to contribute approximately 5
percent of the total carbon dioxide emission in the
world and found to be responsible for the emission of
the greenhouse gas to certain proportion. The world-
wide global warming arising from the emission of the
greenhouse gas is demanding the tourism industry to
pursue changes into Pro-Environmental Behaviors
(PEB) in order to alleviate the global warming.
However, while the researches on the PEB in
daily life are very active, there are only limited
researches in the area of tourism with even less
researches on the relationship between the PEBS of
these two different contexts (Barr, Shaw, Coles &
Prillwitz, 2010; Hares, Dickinson & Wilkes, 2010).
According to findings of prior studies, PEB is dif-
ferent according to the various settings. In par-
ticular, Given that the tourism settings are very
different from the environment of the houses and
that the results of several researches (Barr, et al.,
2010; Miao & Wei, 2013) are reporting that it is
much more difficult to behave environmentally
under the tourism circumstances than daily life, it
is important to compare the PEB under these two
different contexts. When the focus is placed on the
reasons for differences in these two settings, the
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