earticle

영어

As a main purpose of ecotourism is to protect natural environment, it is important to ensure sustainability of ecotourism sites. Also, understanding ecotourists’ behavior related to sustainability is a key for ecotourism because their activities might impact on the sustainability in any form. Thus, this study was designed to analyze the integrated model of Self-determination Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior, along with sustainable intelligence as a moderating variable, to identify the behavioral intention of ecotourists. The empirical analysis was conducted using 265 questionnaires collected from ecotourists visiting Geomun Oreum Lava Tube, utilizing SPSS/WIN 27.0 and AMOS 23. The results revealed that a stronger sense of intrinsic motivation positively influences planned behavior and ultimately has a significant impact on the formation of behavioral intention. Furthermore, it was confirmed that sustainable intelligence has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between ecotourists' attitude and their behavioral intention. The contributions of this study are as follow. First, this study provides unique understandings on ecotourists’ behavioral intention based on the integrated model of the two theories which has not been actively discussed in the previous studies. Second, this study suggests new findings on the value of sustainable intelligence as a moderating variable in order to improve ecotourists’ behavioral intention. Based on these contributions, we need to develop ecotourism considering the relationships among the variables of self-determination and planned behavior related to sustainable intelligence of ecotourists.