The Effect of Motivation of Active and Passive Sport Tourists on the Improvement of Sport Tourism

In recent years, sport events have received increasing attention as one of the most important economic development strategies. Therefore, the main aim of this research was to investigate the effect of motivation of active and passive sport tourists on improvement of sport tourism. 194 athlete and non-athlete university students who participated in student tournaments were selected as the sample (active and passive sport tourists). The self-regulated sport tourism questionnaire with 6 subscales (place of tournaments, distance traveled, mode of transport, length of stay, city entertainment and expenditure) was used to analyze the university students' motivation. After K-S (p>0.05) had been used to check the normal distribution of data, the descriptive statistics, t test and Pearson test at (p≤0.05). The results indicated that in active sport tourism group, distance traveled (52.31%), mode of transport (%42.06) and place of tournament (%40.52) were the main motivations to participate in sport events while in passive sport tourism group, expenditure (%48.31), distance traveled (%42.72) and city entertainment (%41.33) were the main motivations. Also, there was a high correlation between distance traveled (r=0.26) and expenditure (r=0.21) with the level of sport tourists' participation in university tournaments.