Study on Collaboration Intentions and Behaviors of Public Participation in the Inheritance of ICH Based on an Extended Theory of Planned Behavior

Abstract

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is reported to be disappearing rapidly. Collaboration among different persons is critical to the preservation of ICH inheritance. Previous studies have focused mainly on the inheritance of ICH from the individual perspective, while ignoring the perspective of multi-subject collaboration. For this study, we developed and applied an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the effectiveness of the intentions and behaviors of public participation in the inheritance of ICH during the collaboration process in the inheritance of Regong art in Qinghai Province, China. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the strength of relationships among constructs, and a questionnaire (completed by 351 residents) was used to collect data. The results show that this extended theory of planned behavior can be applied in the evaluation of the collaboration process in the inheritance of ICH. We also introduce a novel construct to the TPB, ‘shared religious beliefs’, defined as uniformity of religion within a social group (in this case, an ethnic minority group), that is, a mono-religious community. Our results show that this construct has a significantly positive effect on collaboration intention among the general public.