Cultural Attitudes as WTP Determinants: A Revised Cultural Worldview Scale

There has been little attention paid to the systematic measurement issue of general attitudes toward human-culture relationships. This paper applied the Cultural Worldview (CW) scale that was developed by Choi et al. in 2007 (published in the Journal of Cultural Economics), and investigated its dimensionality and relationship with willingness to pay (WTP) for cultural heritage protection through a sequential integration between latent variables and valuation models. A case study of 997 Korean respondents was employed to examine conservation values of cultural heritage sites using discrete choice models. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that this scale can be used either as a single second-order factor or four correlated factors. A more parsimonious version of the CW scale with twelve items is endorsed in this paper and the results also confirm that it is valid for use with non-Western nations. The findings support a significant attitude-WTP relationship; there was a significant role of the CW scale that reveals unobserved factors in valuation models.