Sociological study of the relationship between social security and tourism development(Case study: East of Tehran province)

In the development of tourism, there are many influential factors, of which security is the most important factor in its development. Security and tourism are two interdependent issues in domestic and foreign relations that may have a rising or falling impact on each other in bilateral interaction. It means that improving security level has a high impact on tourism and the direction of its economic benefits. And any kind of insecurity at different levels causes irreparable losses to the industry. The present research is aimed at determining the relationship between social security and tourism development in the east of Tehran province.

The research, in terms of aim, is of applied type, and in terms of the research method is of survey type. Library and field methods have been used for collecting data. The statistical population of the research is all local and non-local tourists, visiting eastern Tehran province in 2021, and 391 people were selected as a sample using the unlimited population formula. In this research, two researcher-made questionnaires:  citizens’ social security and tourism development developed by Chris et al. (2006) were used. The analysis of the research data was done in two parts: descriptive (mean, standard deviation, table, figure and graph) and inferential (structural equation modeling) using LISREL and SPSS20.

In this research, the independent variables are: trust building, physical factors, police performance, infrastructural factors, social and cultural factors, and the dependent variable of tourism development. The results of the research indicated that trust-building (0.36), physical factors (0.15), police performance (0.13), infrastructural factors (0.27) and socio-cultural factors (0.25) impact tourism development.The obtained results indicate that there is a positive and meaningful relationship between the components of social security and tourism development at a significance level of 0.01. In other words, the higher the tourists’ social security, the higher is their desire to visit these areas. In case relevant officials pay attention to the security of tourists in all aspects and take the necessary measures, tourism will develop in these regions