What is significant for engagement in cycling and walking in South Korea? Applying value-belief-norm theory
Introduction
In South Korea (hereafter Korea), 37.4 % of the total population walked an average of five times for 30 min per week in 2020 (Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers in Korea, the subject of this paper, also demonstrated increased interest in biking, whether it be for leisure, tourism, or commuting, with 3.3 million of the country’s 13.4 million cyclists using bicycles daily (Korea Transport Institute (KOTI), 2022). Cycling and walking as forms of active transport have significant environmental, health, and social benefits (Kim and Hall, 2022a, Kim and Hall, 2021b). The development of theoretical understandings of active transport are important as they help provide insights for better targeted marketing and promotion to encourage greater public engagement in cycling and walking (Kim and Hall, 2022c, Kim et al., 2022b).
Norm activation theory originally utilized three major constructs (awareness of consequences, ascription of responsibility, and personal norm) in explaining the formation of pro-social intention as well as behavior (Schwartz, 1977). In linking value theory as well as the new environmental paradigm (NEP) to the norm activation framework, value-belief-norm (VBN) theory has been shown to be a substantial predictor of individual environmental behavior including, for example, support for social movements such as environmentalism (Stern et al., 1999). The VBN theory includes predicting hotel consumers’ pro-environmental behavior with the theory of planned behavior (Han, 2015), eco-cruise purchasing intention with value-attitude-behavior (VAB) theory (similar to VBN theory) (Han et al., 2019), and environmentally sustainable consumer behavior (Han, 2021). With VAB theory, values have also been found to have great impact on personal and social norms relevant to consumer behavior, such as environmentally friendly dining (Kim et al., 2020), COVID-19 biosecurity interventions (Kim et al., 2021), and sustainable development goals (Kim and Hall, 2021a).
Active transport, such as cycling and walking, makes a distinctive contribution to environmental and human health, and also has become an important component of sustainable transport planning and placemaking strategies (Koh and Wong, 2013, Hall and Ram, 2019, Millward et al., 2013, Nielsen and Skov-Petersen, 2018). For instance, bikeability (the capacity of a landscape to be cycled) has been utilized as a means of expressing the probability that persons or groups of publics will select to cycle as a mode of mobility for commuting, utilitarian purposes, or leisure (Koh and Wong, 2013, Nielsen and Skov-Petersen, 2018). Walking is also an eco-friendly substitute for carbon-based motorized mobility as well as an essential form of physical health activity (Millward et al., 2013). Walkability has been a growing focus of urban planners as they seek to develop more sustainable built environments, that provides the advantages of accessibility, enhanced community relations, liveliness, air quality, and health (Hall and Ram, 2019). In addition, VAB theory has well predicted active transport users’ behavior (Kim and Hall, 2022b). VBN theory has also highly explained preventive travel behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic (Kim et al., 2022a, Kim et al., 2022b) as well as volunteer tourists’ environmentally friendly behavior for supporting sustainable tourism development (Park et al., 2022).
Regardless of whether cycling or walking, the VBN theory has been used to explain active transport user preferences in urban areas (Lind et al., 2015) and parental travel mode choices for their children (Nordfjærn and Zavareh, 2017) but has only received limited application to issues of behavior. Despite the importance of the VBN theory in examining pro-environmental behavior as well as active and sustainable transport in terms of selecting travel modes (Lind et al., 2015, Nordfjærn and Zavareh, 2017), few studies have employed the VBN paradigm to explain cyclists and walkers’ behavior, along with the differences between the two main active transport modes. To bridge this gap, this study builds and tests a theoretically integrated research framework, applying the VBN theory and the moderating role of cycling and walking by partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with multi-group analysis (MGA) and comparing cyclist and walker groups by fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Accordingly, this research provides theoretical implications to the study literature and offers insights for active transport planners in terms of effectively promoting cycling and walking.
Section snippets
Value-belief-norm theory
A value-belief-norm (VBN) theory defines that “individuals who accept a movement’s basic values, believe that valued objects are threatened, and believe that their actions can help restore those values experience an obligation (personal norm) for pro-movement action” (Stern et al., 1999, p. 81). Grounded in Schwartz’s (1977) theory, norm-relevant actions consist of three concepts: acceptance of a particular individual's values; the belief that something important to those values is threatened;
Measurements
Due to measurement imprecisions with use of single questions, formerly confirmed multiple measures were adapted for the survey questionnaire (Churchill, 1979). The survey instrument consists of six constructs and 24 items. Specifically, value on cycling and walking was estimated with four questions drawn from prior literature (Kim et al., 2020, Schwartz, 1977). Four items relevant to belief in cycling and walking came from existing works (Kim et al., 2022a, Kim et al., 2022b, Stern et al., 1999
Sample profile
The demographics and general information for the entire group (659 cases) are provided in Supplementary C and the two groups for cycling (329 respondents) and walking (330 respondents) in Table 1. The results showed that the cycling group is substantially different from walking group. For instance, cyclists are more likely to be university graduates, having high income, office workers, living in the Seoul-metropolitan area, protecting the environment, cycle more compared to before the COVID-19,
Discussion
Encouraging people to engage more in cycling and walking as the most common forms of active transport is an important aspect of improving place livability (Kovacs-Györi and Cabrera-Barona, 2019, McCormack et al., 2021) which, when combined with the replacement of carbon-based transport trips by active transport, can substantially improve air quality and reduce emissions leading to more sustainable environments (Kim and Hall, 2022a, Kim and Hall, 2022b, Kim and Hall, 2022c). However, in order to
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to note their appreciation of the editors and anonymous reviewers for their time and contributions to this study. The authors also thank Injae Cho, Donghyeon Kim, Sang Youn Kim, Dong Uk Kim, and Sangwoo Kim for their thoughtful advice and refining of the survey instrument.
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