Intention to engage in ecotourism development: validation and extension of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (Version 2.1)

ABSTRACT

This work, based on the conceptual work by Scheyvens and van der Watt (2021), amends the original Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) by including three new dimensions: economic empowerment, cultural empowerment, and environmental empowerment. In so doing, the modified scale is applied in a region of Ecuador not known for its ecotourism opportunities, to determine how residents’ (n = 500) perceived empowerment factors into their intent to engage in ecotourism endeavours through a modified theory of planned behaviour model. Psychometric properties of the 13-item modified RETS were strong. Six of the nine proposed hypotheses were supported via structural equation modelling using IBM Amos 28.0. The first-order model (of perceived empowerment) accounted for 33% of the variance in attitudes about engaging in ecotourism and 82% of the variance in behavioural intentions to engage in ecotourism. A second-order model increased variance explained in attitudes to 70% and in behavioural intentions to 89%.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic empowerment
• cultural empowerment
• environmental empowerment
• theory of planned behaviour
• ecotourism
• Ecuador

Acknowledgement

This work is also partially financed by Portuguese Funds provided by FCT –Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal) through project UIDB/04020/ 2020 and with DOI 10.54499/UIDB/04020/2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was approved by the Instituto de Investigaciones at ESPOCH in Ecuador.