Impact of Tourists’ Perceived Value and Sense of Social Responsibility on the Low-Carbon Consumption Behavior Intention: A Case Study of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting study that examines the interrelationships between perceive values, social responsibility and other variables in the context of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. The manuscript has merits for publication. That said, the following concerns need to be addresseds: 

1. p.183, Monroe (1990) proposed that customers' perceived value is positive and negative. Thus, all hypothesis related to perceived value needs to reflect this statement. For example, H3: The perceived value of tourists has a positive and significant effect on sense of social responsibility of tourists. Do you mean the perceived value, being it positive or negative, will have a positive.... Of course not, rather, it is the positive perceived value that is positively related to tourists' social responsibility. To avoid this issue, the hypothesis can be rewritten as: the more positive tourists' perceived values, the much higher their social responsibility would be... do the change for other hypotheses...

2. I do not think a randomness can be achieved for onsite survey. Convenience sampling is commonly used. 

3. Data screening, missing data treatment, and data kurtosis and skewness need to be reported. (a table showing the kurtosis and skewness of variables used in SEM is preferred as an appendix).

4. Results for EFA need to be tabulated (factors, items, loadings, reliability a value...), cross-loading issues need to be addressed, if any. 

5. The resulting SEM diagrams need to be presented 

6. Better to have a table indicating which hypothesis supported and which rejected

7.  Any issues by combining samples from onsite before COVID and samples from online post the pandemic？What is the sample before and what is after the pandemic? At what circumstances that data collected from different sources can be combined for analysis?

8. In addition to sample size being not large, survey periods/duration may also be an issue. That is, surveys were only carried out in a short time, not spread out year round....may not be representative of the tourist population of the park.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

it is very interesting paper that examines the impact of tourists' perceived value and sense of social responsibility on the low-carbon consumption behavior intention.

The topic is interesting and it is well presented by the authors.

Some suggestions that may improve the qualite of the paper:

- Introduction needs to be enriched with at least few researches on the issue of carbon emissions and tourism, or even between pollution and/or environmental issues an tourism, tourism and renwable and “clean” energy etc.). There is a gap in that issue in the theoretical background.

Section 2 - Hypothesis

some of the hypothesis need to be more specific in the theoretical justification. For example, in H1, why the authors expect a positive relation? The authors use referrences that affect consumption attitude, but donot specify whether it is a positive effect and thats why they expect too the same effect. (see also H4)

Furthermore, in my opinion, the theoretical justification and examples used by the authors in H3, concludes in a negative relation between perceived value and sence of social responsibility. If it is correct, the authors should justify why the conclude in a hypothesis of positive relationship. 

Section 2.6 - Questionnaire

More details for the format of the questions would be useful (e.g. open questions/answers? Likert scale? Mixed etc…)

Furthermore, some tables with descriptive statistics would be more helpful (but not obligatory)

 Section 3.1.1

It would be better for potential readers, to be included in the sub section the output of the model with all the data available instead of their presentation in text.

 Lines 273-282: I don’t think the double presentation is needed (in text and in the table). Just the table with a few words discussing those results that are of major interest, would be more appropriate.

Table 3.2

What type of correlation the authors used?

It is interestin that as the table shows, the diagonal (correlation between the same factors) is not 1.  Is due to the type of correlation used?

Line 335 - Discussion

As the citations referred (77, 88, 89), are not in the field of tourism, authors should provide few details on the points that their study support the findings of those surveys. It is important in the discussion part, to present clearly the similarities and differences with other research works. (like the connection provided in lines 396-400)

Line 354

Studies (instead of Studied??)

Discussion/Conclusions

In the discussion and/or conclusions, a more clear connection of the output of the analysis, with the 5 hypothesis that the authors develop (H1-H5) in the theoretical background, is needed. Authors should refer the part of the findings that confirm (or not) each one of them. Thus, the results will be more clear for the potential reader(s).

The questions (or the questionnaire) used, should be provided (if not already) in supplementary data  

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In principle, the subject treated by the paper is of interest. The literature review and the hypotheses raised are correctly exposed. The problem appears with the exposition of the methodology and the analysis carried out.

Sections 2.6 and 2.7 should constitute a separate methodology section. In addition, section 2.6 does not provide any citation to support the origin of the scales used. Section 2.7, referring to fieldwork, should also be expanded and a new section on the specific analysis method used for the structural equation model added.

Regarding the presentation of results, the first thing is, would we not be facing a model of structural equations with second-order constructs? This causes that in the review of the literature 5 hypotheses are proposed, but then in the results there are 29 hypotheses (line 298). This situation is confusing and a table like No. 4 would be expected but for the five initial hypotheses. The analysis and presentation of results should be revised. On the other hand, the reason for carrying out the analysis of the mediation effects in section 3.3 is not justified.

Finally, the content of lines 277-282 appears in table 1 and is unnecessary. Finally, the citations in the text should be reviewed, since citations in Forests format and APA format are mixed.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

the following concerns are not addressed and should be addressed:

1. Data screening, missing data treatment, and data kurtosis and skewness need to be reported. (a table showing the kurtosis and skewness of variables used in SEM is preferred as an appendix).

2. Results for EFA need to be tabulated (factors, items, loadings, reliability a value...), cross-loading issues need to be addressed, if any.  (that, a table showing EFA results should be included, following the sentence "The present study applies exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to the entire sample for reliability" (line 287). Cross-loading issues need to be addressed, that is, if an item is heavily loaded on two factors, what is the loading difference (i.e., 0.15 or 0.2)  applied to keep the item or drop?

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper has improved but still needs some improvements. The text that I indicated that it was already in the tables is still in lines 297-302 (they are already existing data in Table 4). The presentation of the results of the Structural Equations Model, in section 4.2, is still not entirely clear (for example, Figure 2 is not cited in the text). On the other hand, the format used for citations still needs to be improved.

Author Response

Cover Letter Response

 

Dear Reviewer,

 

Thank you very much for your time involved in reviewing the manuscript.

We also appreciate your clear and detailed feedback and hope that the explanation has fully addressed all of your concerns. In response to your "The paper has improved but still needs some improvements. The text that I indicated that it was already in the tables is still in lines 297-302 (they are already existing data in Table 4). The presentation of the results of the Structural Equations Model, in section 4.2, is still not entirely clear (for example, Figure 2 is not cited in the text). On the other hand, the format used for citations still needs to be improved", we have made the following changes to the manuscript:

First, we modified the part of rows 297-302 that duplicated the table, as follows:

 

“The results showed that both the AVE and CR met the requirements, the convergent validity of the ten constructs were satisfactory and the scale had good convergent validity”.

 

Secondly, we refined the Results part. We have added a paragraph 3 in sector 4.2 to illustrate the Figure 2. Some tables and textual explanations are inserted into the paper for better interpretation of the factor loading matrix in section 4, as follows:

 

“For better interpretation of the factor loading matrix, the present study uses a principal component factor analysis. The factor attribution of each topic can be determined from the rotated component matrix. The factor loadings were all greater than 0.7. The attribution factors were named as different dimensions of the variables according to the topic content. There are illustrated in Table 2 and Table 3.”

“Table 2. Rotating component matrix of sense of social responsibility”.

“Table 3. Rotating component matrix of perceived value”.

 

Finally, we have made changes to the format of the citations.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your time involved and this great opportunity for us to improve the manuscript. We hope you will find this revised version satisfactory.

 

Kind Regards

Prof Luo, Ms. Li and Ms. Qu

E-mail: [email protected]