Employing a value-belief-norm framework to gauge Carthage residents’ intentions to support sustainable cultural heritage tourism

This is the Author’s Original Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism on 16 March 2020, available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1738444. In light of the recent conflicts in Carthage over land use, cultural heritage preservation, and sustainable tourism, this work utilized a value-belief-norm (VBN) theoretical framework to consider psychological antecedents of residents’ behavioral intentions to support cultural heritage tourism. As such, personal values, cultural worldview, awareness of consequences, ascription of responsibility, and subjective norms were considered antecedents of intentions to support cultural heritage tourism. Data were collected from 475 Carthage residents in nine neighborhoods adjacent to UNESCO World Heritage Sites using an on-site self-administered questionnaire. The proposed model was assessed through confirmatory factor analysis (to demonstrate sound psychometric properties across all 11 factors within the model), followed by structural equation modelling. Overall, 15 of the 19 proposed hypotheses were supported, ultimately contributing to 28% of the variance explained in residents’ behavioral intentions to support cultural heritage tourism. This work not only provides support for the utilization of the VBN model within the context of cultural heritage tourism, it also deepens our understanding of the theoretical framework through the inclusion of the multi-dimensional construct cultural worldview.