Authenticity Perception as a Cultural Antecedent of Planned Behavior: Viewing Intention toward a Modernized Suizhou Huagu Opera among Live and Online Audiences

This study asks how authenticity perception relates to viewing intention toward a modernized local Chinese opera, using Suizhou Huagu Opera as the case and the theory of planned behavior as the framework.Applications of planned behavior to cultural consumption ordinarily place a value-based antecedent ahead of attitude alone and leave subjective norm and perceived behavioral control to social and resource conditions.That specification is poorly suited to living heritage, because the community recognition that constitutes authenticity is the same social fact that normative support is meant to capture.The modernizations whose legitimacy is in question are the same devices that make the work followable.The study therefore specifies authenticity perception, modeled as a higherorder construct of objective, constructive, and existential dimensions, as a common antecedent of all three components, and tests that specification against the attitude-only alternative.Survey data were collected from 520 respondents, comprising 262 live attendees and 258 online contacts, and analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.The measurement model showed good fit and satisfactory reliability and validity, and common method bias was not a serious concern.All six structural relationships were positive and statistically significant, with attitude and perceived behavioral control as the strongest correlates of viewing intention and subjective norm as the weakest.Authenticity perception was indirectly associated with viewing intention through all three components, and the specification was preferred over a partial-mediation alternative with a direct path and over a first-order alternative that entered the three dimensions as separate predictors.Measurement invariance held across the two audience groups, and the relationships from authenticity perception to the three components did not differ between them.In contrast, the relationships to intention did: the attitude route was significantly stronger for live attendees, and the control route was significantly stronger for online contacts.Theoretically, the normative and control pathways rather than the attitude pathway are where a living-heritage setting departs from existing planned-behavior models; practically, the results suggest that authenticity work travels across channels while audiencedevelopment work does not.