From Digital Narratives To Travel Intention: A Dual-Process Model Mediated By Attitude And Moderated By Media Engagement

Abstract

Digital narratives have become a core tool for tourism marketing in the social media era, but the psychological mechanisms by which they influence tourists' decision-making have not been fully elucidated. In this study, we integrated the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and narrative transmission theory to construct a dual-processing framework for digital narratives to influence tourism intention, revealing that they shape tourism attitudes through the central path (information quality) and the peripheral path (narrative attractiveness), thus influencing tourism intention and exploring the moderating effect of media engagement. The study used an online questionnaire to collect 367 valid samples, which were analyzed by structural equation modeling. The reliability of the measurement model was good ( α= 0.847 -0.912, CR=0.853-0.915, AVE=0.638-0.782), and the fit of the structural model was excellent ( χ²/df = 2.189, CFI=0.947, RMSEA=0.057). The results showed that: (1) both digital narrative quality ( β= 0.394^ ) and attractiveness ( β= 0.447^ ) significantly and positively affected tourism attitudes; (2) tourism attitudes fully mediated the effect of digital narratives on intention, with indirect effects of 0.269 and 0.305, respectively; and (3) media engagement significantly moderated the relationship between attitudes and intention ( Δχ² = 12.437^ ), and the path coefficient of high engagement group ( χ²/df = 2.189, CFI=0.947, RMSEA=0.057). The path coefficient of the high participation group ( β= 0.762 ) was significantly higher than that of the low participation group ( β= 0.591 ), with a critical value of 4.23. The contribution of the study is to integrate the dual theoretical perspectives to clarify the influencing mechanism, to validate the mediating role of attitudes, and to reveal the boundary conditions of media participation, so that it can provide differentiated strategic guidance for destination marketing.