An ecotourist by whose standards? Developing and testing the Ecotourist Identification Scale (EIS)

Despite numerous attempts at operationalising ecotourism, none have explicitly incorporated the three tenets of ecotourism (i.e. nature, education, and sustainability) into scale development with the purpose of identifying ecotourists from non-ecotourists. Therefore, we used a combination of Churchill and Rossiter’s scale development frameworks to create the Ecotourist Identification Scale (EIS) as a tool for identifying ecotourists based on these three criteria. We split a sample of 786 U.S. travellers in half to perform a Principal Components Analysis for scale purification on one half followed by a Confirmatory Factor Analysis on the other. Results of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis indicated strong construct reliability for each component of the EIS based on factor loadings above 0.50, reliability coefficients exceeding 0.70, and Average Variance Explained above 50%. Furthermore, we employed Structural Equation Modeling to explore which aspects of ecotourism’s three tenets influence intention to engage in ecotourism by testing the relationship between EIS scale components and ecotourism intention. Results indicate interest in nature and environmental sustainability are significantly related to ecotourism intention while interest in education, socio-cultural sustainability, and economic sustainability are not, indicating discrepancies between the academic definition of ecotourism and the factors driving tourists to engage in ecotourism.