Identifying the Factors Affecting the Competitiveness of Cities through Tourism in Kermanshah City

Today, due to global competition increase, cities are looking for the ways to increase their competitive position among other cities Tourism is a factor in urban competitiveness. Tourism, as the factor that improves urban competitiveness through tourism in national and international markets, caused to facilitate planning for the development of cities. This is an applied which is based on the exploratory factor analysis (Q) method as a mixed or combined method and 50 experts were selected by purposive sampling on the subject of research.  In the qualitative stage and based on the summary of the discourse space from 50 propositions, finally 36 propositions were selected for the Q sample. In the qualitative stage after collecting the information obtained from the Q-sorting, the Q-factor analysis method was used; it is the main method to analyze the Q-data matrix. They were analyzed by varimax rotation method. SPSS software was used to discover the existing mental patterns identifying the influential variables by calculating factor scores. Using research indicators, 5 different mental models or factors with a total variance of 82.27% were calculated including political-institutional, economic, socio-cultural, physical and environmental factors. The variables were categorized in order of priority; in political-institutional factors, the variable of macro-government policies regarding the region, in economic factors, the appropriateness of the price of tourism services, in socio-cultural factors, increasing the culture of tourism, in physical factors, development of tourism facilities and services and in the environmental factor, climate change had the highest scores in each factor, respectively. Generally, the physical factor has a more specific value than other factors and is more important.