Assessment of Sustainable Rural Tourism(Case study: Saman District, Shahrekord County)

Today tourism as general and sustainable tourism as particular, in rural and urban tourist areas have become one of the most important topics in scientific and academic meetings of the world. Evaluating the present status and progress toward sustainable tourism, especially in rural areas,has made the rural development in economic, social - cultural,, institutional and environmental respects.However, achieving the sustainability in different aspects reqires the gauges, indices and accurate universal tourism patterns for evaluationg and defining tourism sustainability status.therefore optimum use of indicators in the field of rural tourism development can have an important role in the diversification of employment, reduction of income differences between rural and urban, reduction of migration and development of infrastructures and increase the satisfaction of the local residents and their life level. In this study, the main question is Whether what are the criteria for sustainable tourism in rural areas of the organization, in terms of economic, social - cultural, environmental - physical and institutional stability that led to the development of tourism in the rural environment? the method of this study is descriptive - analytical and of surveying type and a questionnaire was prepared for taking the opinion and views of two groups of rural and authorities families. The statistical society of Saman district is 23 villages that 8 villages with 2848 households with respect to their potentials, attractions and geographical situation and, 150 households (about 5 percent of the total households in each village provided that the number of samples is not less than 15) and 20 people of the authorities were selected as the sample of local statistical society.In this study, after filling the questionnaire and assessment of structural validity by analysis method and KMO test and finally the questionare’s perpetuity by cronbach's alpha test, 124 indices by Delphi method in the form of four main hyphothesis were selected and by statistical correlation, Kendall b, c, gamma, Spearman in the statistical package SPSS and EXCEL software were tested.Finding and According to research findings, from total of 42 indicators of economic, social - cultural, environmental and the institutional framework of sustainable tourism in rural areas, 8 indicators from people’s view and 15 indicators from the authorities view were confirmed. However, the analysis of two views showed convergence (consistency) in 25 indicators and Divergence (anisotropy) in 17 indicators.