Survey procedure and questionnaire design
We surveyed visitors in MBCS using the modified pre/post-visit survey
approach of García-Cegarra and Pacheco (2017) to assess tourist
knowledge and attitude toward bats and their conservation. Roughly
three-quarters of tourists were unwilling to participate or did not
finish questionnaires (e.g., due to limited time) to our initial long
and wordy questionnaire (e.g., Choi and Pak 2004). Subsequently, we
redesigned our questionnaire to ease readability and obtain more
responses. Only responses from the updated questionnaire were used in
the final analyses.
A structured questionnaire was administered face-to-face onsite with
consenting tourists between November 2018 and March 2019. The
questionnaire included 16 questions divided into pre-visit and
post-visit sections. Tourists’ sociodemographic background (e.g.,
gender, age, group, educational attainment) was asked pre-visit. The
second part of the pre-visit questionnaire measured motivations of
tourists, prior encounters with bats, knowledge about bats (e.g.,
ability to recognize species, knowledge about bats, ecosystem service
provisions) and conservation willingness.
Tourists proceeded to the cave site for
an average of 30 minutes of bat-watching activities. After, tourists
were requested to complete the post-visit questionnaire, which consisted
of questions to determine tourist satisfaction with their visit and
their perceptions of conservation values of bat-watching. To assess the
effectiveness of short-term learning enhancement between visits, two
questions (knowledge about bat ecosystem services, and willingness to
conserve and protect bats) from the pre-visit questionnaire were
repeated in the post-visit questionnaire. Most of the questions had
categorical responses (“Yes,” “No,” “Not sure”). These responses
were then coded to three-level scoring scale (e.g., 1 = No, 2 = Not
sure, 3 = Yes) when necessary (e.g., Mulema et al. 2020).