The impact of architectural heritage interpretation quality at the Imperial Citadel of Hue on responsible tourist behavior in sustainable tourism: the mediating role of personal norms

Abstract

This paper discusses how the quality of heritage interpretation in the Imperial Citadel of Hue, in the context of sustainable development, influences the responsible visiting behavior of people, in addition to testing the mediating effect of personal norm. The research adopted mixed-methods design where a qualitative phase was adopted to narrow down the scales and a quantitative phase was adopted to test the measurement and structural models. A total of 560 visitors to the Imperial Citadel of Hue were used to gather data between March and September of 2025 using a structured questionnaire comprising of five-point Likert scale questions. The findings reveal that heritage interpretation quality is a second-order construct that is composed of four first-order dimensions, including: quality of content, attractiveness, mode of delivery, and incorporation of sustainable development messages. The scales also exhibited acceptable reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. The results of structural equation modeling show that the quality of heritage interpretation positively influences personal norm (? = 0.603; p < 0.001) and responsible visiting behavior (? = 0.421; p < 0.001), and personal norm also influences responsible visiting behavior ( 0.223; p < 0.001). The indirect impact of the quality of heritage interpretation on responsible visiting behavior via personal norm was 0.134 with the overall impact of 0.555. The delivery method was the strongest among the four first order dimensions of heritage interpretation quality and the other three dimensions were the integration of sustainable development messages, attractiveness and content quality. The findings are indicative that better delivery channels and better incorporation of sustainability messages in the interpretation can reinforce personal norms and encourage responsible visiting behaviors to heritage sites.