modeling tourists’ environmental behaviors by structural equations: towards tourism wise development in birjand

Many of the serious today’s environmental problems are, directly orindirectly, caused by humans' irresponsible behavior. the current study,then, aimed at modeling the environmental behavior of tourists indestinations found in birjand, iran. the effects of independent constructssuch as environmental perception (p), satisfaction (s), attitude (a), andactive involvement (ai) on the dependent construct of the environmentalbehavior (eb) of tourists were investigated. the partial least squaresstructural equation modeling (pls-sem) was used via smartpls 3software. according to the results, the reliability of the model, andcronbach's alpha values of latent and observant variables were acceptable(eb=0.851, p= 0.898, s=0.920, a=0.852, ai= 0.903); the combinedreliability (rho or cr) for constructs ranged between 0.874 and 0.931. theaverage variance extracted (ave) for eb, p, s, a, and ai were measured at0.385, 0.555, 0.530, 0.530, and 0.595, respectively. the correlation betweenlatent variables, according to fornell and larker method showed that the aand ai constructs were more positively correlated with each other. as awhole, the results showed that perception has a significant and positive effecton the tourists’ environmental behavior in natural and historical destinations.this is while no significant correlation was found between satisfaction,attitude, and active involvement. this research provided a scientific basis fortourism management and offered some suggestions that can be useful forformulating policies, and wise tourism development in the context ofenvironmental protection in relevant administrative departments.