Pro-environmental Behaviour of Tourists in Uzbekistan: Application of Protection Motivation Theory

Chapter 3: Research Methodology

3.0 Introduction

This chapter covers the research methods in the research process which involves a body of appropriate and suitable methods. The steps involved in the methodology were discussed individually which encompass the research setting, measurement items, data collection, sampling method, data analysis.

3.1 Research setting

Research setting is the physical, social, or experimental context within which research is conducted. In a research paper, describing this setting accurately is crucial since the results and their interpretation may depend heavily on it. (Snowdon et al., 2014). Research setting, in current research, was chosen is touristic destinations of Uzbekistan where a lot of respondents were met.
Firstly, it is important to choose proper research techniques before selecting a setting. There are a lot of research techniques that study are conducted as per its data collection used such as a survey method, the study based on literature review, an experimental study, case study, and so on (Bell et al., 2020). For current study, the researcher applied design of quantitative research. Such research design includes the application of mathematical and statistical models (Burns, 2014). Since this research requires collection of quantitative data, the survey technique was selected. Survey enables data to be collected in a manner which provides a statistical view and thus, enables the results to be generalized to a population. This research adopted the deductive approach since a clear understanding of pro-environmental behaviour of tourists in relation to Protection Motivation Theory. This specifically involved the development of hypotheses, collection of quantitative data, testing of the hypotheses and explanation of the causal relationships between the variables measured to justify the theory with the results.
The statistical population of current study includes tourists visiting historical cities in Uzbekistan, particularly, Samarkand, Bukhara in 2023 and also international participants of the Festival Stihia 2022 which was held near the Aral Sea in February (Picture 2). The sample size comprised 310 respondents. The participants in the survey had to meet the following conditions: 1)he/she must be a tourist visiting the place (either international or domestic), 2)he/she must be 18 years old or older.

Picture 2. Main tourists sites in Uzbekistan (Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Tashkent, The Aral Sea)
3.2 Data collection method
Primary data was collected through the questionnaire which is an efficient way to gather feedbacks and responses from a huge sample for quantitative analysis.
In collecting the survey data, self-administered questionnaire was distributed to the targeted population for this study to gather data about their opinions and behaviours to answer the research questions (Sekaran, 2012). From the data collected, the relationships between the variables measured and concepts can then be identified and demonstrated to justify the hypotheses formulated prior to this research. The participants were randomly selected. A sample chosen randomly is meant to be an unbiased representation of the total population. (Etikan & Bala, 2017)
The data of the current research were collected from January to March in 2023. Respondents were asked to complete questionnaires which adapted from Arezu Shafiei and Hamideh Maleksaedi (2020) in their study of Pro-environmental behaviour by applying PMT. (Shafiei&Maleksaeidi, 2020). Several changes were made in the questions in the questionnaire to measure the pro-environmental behavior of tourists and factors affecting it.The questionnaire consisted of 10 parts. In the introduction the respondents were informed about the purpose and brief explanation of this survey and some information about the researchers; there was also written that the respondents needed to be 18 years old to participate and If they wanted to cease participation, they could at any time.
The first part included five questions to measure pro-environmental behavior of tourists. The second part was comprised three questions related to Perceived Severity. In the third part there were three questions on Perceived Vulnerability, followed by three questions about rewards. There were four questions in the fifth part related to Self-Efficacy. The sixth part was consisted of three questions on Response-efficacy and the seventh part included three questions related to Response costs. The next part included the contact with the environmental information resources (TV, radio, books, Internet, environmental experts, environmental groups, family and friends). The last part comprised demographic information such as gender, age, educational level, residency, marital status, employment status and membership in environmental organizations. Responses were categorized based on five-point Likert-scale from completely disagree (code 1) to completely agree (code 5). The questionnaire was modified according to the results of the reliability test, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the 24 items accounted for 0.82.