Evaluating Psychographic Measures among Undergraduates: Relevance to Marketing of Sustainable Tourism

Abstract

Advancing sustainable development goals can be achieved through increasing sustainable behavior and consumption within the global tourism industry. In this work, undergraduate students’ sustainability values were investigated in a manner that could inform a marketing approach to directing tourist behavior. A survey was developed by combining existing scales designed to measure values related to sustainable consumption, and was administered to undergraduate students at a large research university in the Pacific Northwest (N=438) from selected disciplines known to have either high or low propensities for consuming sustainable tourism. Using factor analysis, 18 constructs of sustainability and related values were developed; results suggest that there are unexplored sustainability values that tourism marketers can explore further to improve product development and marketing mixes to increase sustainable consumption. Constructs were subsequently assessed with two-way ANOVAs to understand differences in psychographic characteristics among disciplines and genders, revealing that while psychographic characteristics related to sustainability vary significantly among disciplines, differences between genders are infrequent.