Assessing the concept of rural development with emphasis on the perspective of villagers (Case study: Damavand County)

Development is a concept for expressing deep themes that have been pursued throughout history under other headings. The perfectionist nature of man is always at every level and stage of his intellectual, social and historical development, based on the level of perception, cognition and epistemological, ontological foundations. And its anthropology has somehow defined, regulated, and pursued it. Therefore, with this vision, the forthcoming research has sought to find the concept of development from the perspective of local people. Therefore, the present study is a qualitative-quantitative research in the category of applied research and due to the combined nature of the research method. In-depth and purposeful interviews were conducted with 48 people from 12 rural areas and a questionnaire was distributed to 240 households to complete. Using MAXQDA software, the research data including the text of the interviews were divided into meaning units and then summarized by compression. Finally, in order to analyze the data, the TOPSIS model and cluster analysis method were used. The concept of rural development was classified into 5 main categories including infrastructure, superstructure, socio-institutional, economic and environmental. The results showed that the residents of the villages in the region had a view of the concept of development, derived from their needs, so that the villages that felt less need within the framework of development components, the lower the desired level of development and in contrast to the villages that felt more need in They had a framework of development components, they considered the desired level of development higher. The results also showed that, considering that in the combined index, the optimal level of development is 0.693, it can be said that the rural areas studied are far from reaching the optimal level of development. Finally, using cluster analysis, the villages of the region were clustered in 4 categories, the results of which showed the spatial inequality between the regions in terms of development indicators.