A Standardized Field-Survey Protocol for Visitor Conservation Willingness and Self-Reported Responsible Travel Behavior at Longmen Grottoes

Heritage-site visitor surveys must generate usable behavioral evidence without disturbing site operations or weakening conservation priorities. However, recruitment boundaries, exclusion rules, measurement checks, model diagnostics, and data archiving are often incompletely reported in heritage tourism studies. This protocol presents a minimum-disruption field-survey workflow for measuring visitor conservation willingness and self-reported responsible travel behavior at Longmen Grottoes, Luoyang, China. The workflow integrates public-area visitor interception, anonymous electronic questionnaire administration, eligibility screening, attention checks, daily raw-data locking, predefined exclusion rules, construct scoring, reliability testing, confirmatory factor analysis, regression and path-model diagnostics, sensitivity checks, and reproducibility archiving. The questionnaire separates heritage knowledge, perceived heritage value, place attachment, pro-environmental message quality, perceived crowding, facility and service support, conservation attitude, conservation willingness, and self-reported responsible travel behavior. Representative implementation showed that the workflow produced an analyzable dataset with auditable exclusions, acceptable measurement diagnostics, and interpretable model outputs. The protocol is intended for heritage-site studies that need transparent visitor-behavior evidence rather than a single satisfaction measure. It can be adapted to other heritage settings by retaining the core procedural sequence while revising site-specific constructs, survey points, language versions, behavioral items, and fieldwork restrictions according to local conservation risks and visitor composition.