A model of behavioral intention to obtain professional certificates among female beauty practitioners: the role of five demographic variables

This study constructs an integrated model, on the basis of three existing BI models with consideration of five demographic variables, to verify the crucial factors influencing practitioners’ behavioral intention (BI) to obtain professional certification. Since the data analysis methods used in most studies may ignore some variable relationships, this study adopted a stepwise model comparison method to obtain the final model. A sample of size 319 was collected from female beauty practitioners. It was found that subjective norms (SN) can positively direct affect attitudes (AT), perceived behavior control (PBC) and personal norms (PN), with 46.6%, 40.7% and 67.6% explained percentages of variation, respectively. AT and PN can positively affect BI directly, while PBC cannot. SN cannot affect BI directly, but indirectly via AT and PN. Overall, 52.9% of the BI variation can be explained, where the main influencing factor of BI is AT, followed by PN. SN only has an indirect impact on BI, and PBC is useless. It was also found that education level (EL), work experience (WE) and monthly income (MI) moderate the influence of SN on AT, marital status (MS) moderates the influence of SN on PBC, while age (AG) has no moderating effect. SN of highly-educated, more experienced, and more income respondents has a higher impact on AT, while SN of unmarried respondents has a higher impact on PBC. Moreover, AT means differ by AG, MS and WE, BI means differ by EL, while no mean difference was found for MI. The higher the AG and WE, the higher the AT mean, married respondents have a higher mean of AT than unmarried respondents, whereas the higher the EL, the lower the BI mean. A revised BI framework is proposed on the basis of the results of stepwise model comparison.