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

Danny Castillo-Vizuete, Alex Gavilanes-Montoya, Kyle Maurice Woosnam, Manuel Alector Ribeiro, Carlos Chávez-Velásquez, Fausto O. Sarmiento and Chadley R. Hollas

Current Issues in Tourism, 2025, vol. 28, issue 10, 1531-1547

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%.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2024.2343777 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:28:y:2025:i:10:p:1531-1547

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rcit20

DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2024.2343777

Access Statistics for this article

Current Issues in Tourism is currently edited by Jennifer Tunstall

More articles in Current Issues in Tourism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().