Investigation of tourism impact on the livelihood activities and assets of rural households, (case study: Zeeyarat village in Gorgan County)

In the recent years, tourism has been recognized as one of the prominent strategies of rural development and poverty reduction especially in developing countries, and has been broadly attended by policy makers and practitioners. However, tourism has been an object of severe criticism by researchers and practitioners of rural development for becoming the focus of attentions in excessive and partial ways lacking roots in development theories. With a critical approach, this research aims to investigate the capitals of Zeeyarat villagers and to evaluate the tourism impacts on the sustainable livelihood development in Zeeyarat village – in Gorgan County, Golestan province.This research is descriptive-analytical in nature using a case study method to investigate the impacts of tourism on the village development. The Time frame of the research is November 2010 until august 2011. Data are derived through various sources such as: questionnaire-based household survey, interviews, observations and secondary sources. Conducting the survey, questionnaires were distributed among 150 rural families which were selected by random sampling from among the total of 575 village households in 2011. Semi-structured interviews were also carried out with 18 individuals. Also two PRA sessions were held in order to obtain more detailed perspectives on tourism experiences in the village and its associated transformations, being a complement to the information obtained from household survey. Afterwards, Content analysis was adopted to analyze the collected data. Predetermined categories and themes employed in the analysis were based on the SLFT framework. In addition, the quantitative data from the questionnaire-survey (related to the livelihoods outcomes or sustainability) were analyzed using the SPSS software version 17.