Environmental Literacy on Ecotourism: A Study on Student Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavioral Intentions in China and Taiwan

Abstract

This study aims to gain further insights to Chinese and Taiwanese university students' environmental literacy on ecotourism. A structural equation model is developed and validated in an effort to explore the differences between Chinese and Taiwanese university students in terms of their environmental knowledge, environmental attitude, and behavioral intentions. The results showed that the ecotourism perception of Chinese and Taiwanese university students affect their behavioral intentions. Chinese university students exhibited a higher correlation between ecotourism knowledge and behavioral intentions than their Taiwanese counterparts. The findings also revealed differences between the Chinese and Taiwanese students in their perception of ecotourism, and this disparity was particularly evident with regards to how ecotourism should be governed. A moderate difference in ecotourism behavioral intentions was also identified, in which Taiwanese university students were less likely to engage in self-empowerment or private empowerment, to be more educated in the field of ecotourism than their Chinese counterparts.

A cross-cultural comparative study of sustainability consciousness between students in Taiwan and Sweden

“…1). This pattern is generally in line with the findings by Fang et al (2018), which indicated higher means among Taiwanese female university students for knowledge, attitudes and behavior intention within the environmental dimension. This has also been confirmed for Taiwanese undergraduate students (Liang et al 2018).…”

“…The mean difference between the Taiwanese and Swedish samples for sustainability behaviors is close to 0.7, a substantial difference on a scale ranging between 1 and 5, for which most responses are found within a smaller part of the scale (the upper half). The stronger knowingness and attitudes and weaker behaviors for the Swedish students compared to Taiwanese students give further support for the criticism of simplistic interpretations concerning causal relationships between knowledge, attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002;Booth 2009;Michalos et al 2012;Fang et al 2018;Liang et al 2018).…”

“…2 showed the gap between attitudes and behaviors was smaller among the Taiwanese students than among the Swedish students. In the study by Fang et al (2018), the correlation between environmental knowledge and behavioral intention was extremely weak for Taiwanese university students, but there was a correlation between environmental attitude and behavioral intention. Fang et al question the focus on knowledge transfer in education as the only way to increase environmental action.…”

“…In Taiwan, Fang et al (2018) found environmental knowledge to be negatively correlated with environmental attitude among university students, but positively correlated with environmental behavioral intention although the correlation was weak. Moreover, environmental attitude was positively correlated with environmental behavioral intention.…”

“…Respect for cultural diversity is considered an important value in international ESD policy, and ESD is supposed to take different shapes to adapt to the cultural context. In line with studies that have compared different nations in relation to environmentalism (Olsson 2018;Fang et al 2018;Yu et al 2019), we aim to investigate and compare the sustainability consciousness (SC) between two groups of senior secondary students that represent two different cultural contexts. These countries belong to distinctly different cultural regions that differ in their value orientations (Schwartz 2004;Hofstede and McCrae 2004;Inglehart and Oyserman 2004).…”