An investigation of the factors influencing college students’ rural cultural preservation behaviors in the context of rural cultural revitalization: a hybrid SEM–ANN approach

Abstract

Introduction: The protection and inheritance of rural culture have emerged as critical components of rural cultural revitalization amid the ongoing implementation of the rural revitalization strategy. College students, characterized by both academic knowledge and social responsibility, have not yet been systematically examined in terms of the mechanisms underlying their participation in rural cultural preservation. Although rural cultural protection has received significant scholarly attention, theoretical and empirical investigations specifically focusing on college students’ behavioral intentions and their determinants remain scarce. An integrated model is proposed based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and social cognitive theory (SCT) to examine the effects of attitude toward the behavior (AT), subjective norm (SN), perceived behavioral control (PB), and self-efficacy (SE) on behavioral intention. In addition, the study explores how social support (SS), as an external social contextual factor, indirectly affects behavioral intention by influencing other psychological variables. Methods: A two-stage analytical strategy combining structural equation modeling (SEM) with artificial neural networks (ANN), was adopted to capture both linear and nonlinear relationships, thereby enhancing the model’s explanatory power and predictive accuracy. A total of 441 valid questionnaires were collected from university students across various regions in China. Results: The ANN results significantly validated the SEM findings, further reinforcing the reliability of the research outcomes. Discussion: This study’s innovation lies in the integration of TPB and SCT into a unified framework for modeling the factors that influence college students’ intentions to engage in rural cultural preservation. In addition, the incorporation of a SEM–ANN hybrid modeling technique effectively addresses the limitations of traditional linear models in capturing complex interaction effects. In summary, this study not only broadens the application scope of TPB and SCT in rural cultural preservation research but also provides theoretical foundations and practical implications for the development of educational interventions to enhance college student engagement.