Intention to engage in ecotourism development: validation and extension of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (Version 2.1)

This work, based on the conceptual work by Scheyvens and van der Watt [Scheyvens, R., & van der Watt, H. (2021). Tourism, empowerment and sustainable development: A new framework for analysis. Sustainability, 13(22), 12606. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212606], amends the original Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) by including three new dimensions: economic empowerment, cultural empowerment, and environmental empowerment. In so doing, the modified scale is applied in a region of Ecuador not known for its ecotourism opportunities, to determine how residents' (n = 500) perceived empowerment factors into their intent to engage in ecotourism endeavours through a modified theory of planned behaviour model. Psychometric properties of the 13-item modified RETS were strong. Six of the nine proposed hypotheses were supported via structural equation modelling using IBM Amos 28.0. The first-order model (of perceived empowerment) accounted for 33% of the variance in attitudes about engaging in ecotourism and 82% of the variance in behavioural intentions to engage in ecotourism. A second-order model increased variance explained in attitudes to 70% and in behavioural intentions to 89%.