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).