Study of Various Dimensions of Security in Iran’s Sport

The present research aims to study the various dimensions of security in Iran’s sport tourism. The statistical population of this research include all of the international sport tourists such as athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors, journalists, and associated delegations, who participated in the Fajr International Games (2010). The total number of the sample population is 420. The preliminary data were collected using a questionnaire devised by the researcher which its validity was approved by the experts. To determine the reliability, the questionnaires were distributed among 25 foreign sport tourists, resulting in Cronbach's alpha (α=0.83). This questionnaire investigated various dimensions such as the sport tourists satisfaction with the existing security in Iran, the security-disturbing factors from the view point of sport tourists before and after traveling to Iran, the role of the tourist police in the maintenance and improvement of tourism in Iran, the role of the media in depicting security in this country, and the measures these tourists suggest to be taken to improve security in Iran’s sport tourism. For data analysis, in the descriptive statistics section, standard deviation, cumulative frequency, cumulative frequency percentage, mean and mode were identified and for the evaluation of the data SPSS16 was employed. The results show that the major causes of worry for sport tourists before coming to Iran were: social aggressiveness, personal territory violation, and robbery. However, 34% of the tourists declared they were not worried at all about the security in Iran before their departure. The most prominent matters the sport tourists were anxious about, during their visit to Iran, were: lack of personal security, social aggressiveness, and psychological insecurity. However, regarding some security-disturbing matters like hitting, murder, rape, and terrorism, no signs of concern among the tourists were felt. Additionally, 53% of the sports tourist didn’t witness any security violating circumstances during their visit to Iran. Anyhow, the feeling of insecurity originating from the media, family and friends, decreased significantly after the tourists’ traveling to Iran.