Modeling the role of knowledge, attitude and environmental values of tourists in showing environment-friendly behaviors (case study: tourists of Qum)

Many believe that the occurrence of environmental problems depends on a variety of factors, including the level of awareness, and conditions and norms of the community. For this reason, it’s important to know how people think about the environment, how much they know it, and how much they are concerned about nature and the environment. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of knowledge, attitude and environmental values of tourists on their environmentally friendly behavior in the city of Qom.

This research is a descriptive-analytical study. The statistical population of the study were tourists visiting the city of Qom. The sample size was estimated 386 individuals based on Cochran formula. In total, 200 and 186 questionnaires were randomly distributed among domestic and foreign tourists, respectively. This research was conducted during spring and summer of 2017. The research instrument was a questionnaire and its validity was confirmed by the formal method and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (0.762). For descriptive analyzes, one-sample T-test and Spearman correlation coefficient were used with SPSS software and for structural equation modeling, AMOS software was used.

Worsening of the environmental problems from national to global level and from short to long term, makes it more important to pay attention to the factors affecting the environment-friendly behaviours. Experiences have shown that there are numerous environmental and social problems in areas where tourism has been developed without a framework, planning and strategy, and in the long run, tourism has created more problems than benefits. The emergence of such problems has led to the formation of environmental movements. The emergence of the idea of protecting the environment further emphasizes on the need for attention to environmental values and behaviors. Obviously, in the process of shaping behavior, many factors and variables are involved. For this reason, it is necessary to move towards a greater understanding of the complexities of the values, attitudes, and personality factors that influence particular behaviors. In the current study, the results of Spearman correlation test with a significant level of 0.776 showed that there was no relationship between the duration of stay of tourists and their environmental behavior. The results of the one-sample T-test indicated that religious tourists are satisfied and are loyal to Qom. Existence of factor loadings of 0.37, 0.41 and 0.41 for the hidden variables of knowledge, attitude and environmental valueof tourists, respectively, showed that these variables had a positive effect on the environmental behaviors of tourists at 95% confidence level.

It should be noted that among the factors affecting the environmentally friendly behaviors, environmental attitudes of tourists have had a greater effect on their environment-frinedly behaviors. The environmental values were the second most influential factor, and the environmental values of tourists was the least influential factor on the environment- frinedly behaviors. In addition, the duration of stay was not related to the environmentally friendly behaviors of tourists.