Investigating the Effects of Tourism on the Development of Rural Settlements with a Structural Equation Modeling Approach (Study: Villages of North Khorasan Province)

Tourism, through its many benefits and benefits, is one of the most important levers of development for local and rural communities today, and its development and promotion is agreed upon by all rural development planners and policymakers. The increasing challenges of rural communities, the high importance of tourism in the development of local communities, and the high ability of tourism target villages to attract tourists are three key elements of special attention to tourism development planning in the villages of North Khorasan Province. Therefore, the present quantitative and applied research, which has been done by descriptive-analytical and causal method, has been conducted to investigate the impacts of tourism on local communities and rural development. The statistical population of the study consists of all household heads of eight villages targeted for tourism in North Khorasan province among which 383 persons are considered as statistical sample. The main data gathering tool was a questionnaire whose validity and reliability was confirmed and SPSS and Amos software were used for data analysis. The results show that the mean score of tourism impact on the local community and the host with a value of 3.195 at 99% confidence level is higher than the average level. The results of the study of rural development status in the study area showed that the mean calculated with 3.157 was significantly higher than the baseline and the level of rural development was also above average. The results of the final model of structural equations modeled the effect of tourism (independent variable) on rural development (dependent variable) in tourism target villages of North Khorasan Province showed that the model is significant at 99% confidence level. In this model, the total impact amount was 0.535, and overall, tourism accounted for about 29% of the variance of rural development in the study area.