The Role of Sports Tourism in Spirituality

Due to the curiosity of new tourists to understand the new concepts and positive benefits and their impact on the tourists' life quality, the researcher decided to study the role of sports tourism in spirituality.

Design/methodology/approach: 

The research tool was Shafi'a and Sabbaghpour Azarian’s (2016) modified questionnaire through which information was received online from virtual networks. The statistical population of the study was all active and inactive sports tourists and the statistical sample included 365 people. The questionnaire had acceptable face and content validity and acceptable reliability (0.89). Statistical analysis of the data of this research was done at two levels of descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistical methods were used in classifying and summarizing data and compiling graphs and tables, and for inferential analysis of data, structural equation modeling was performed using AMOS and SPSS software.

The results show that sports tourism has a significant effect on all dimensions of spirituality, including reaching meaning (0.85), achieving excellence (0.1), and mutual understanding (1.05). This study intends to reduce the purely "economic" view of tourism and pay more attention to other dimensions such as spirituality, which is a human experience for communication that is born of reason and thinking.

In this regard, suggestions for the development of sports tourism concerning it were presented to the dimensions of spirituality.

Originality/value: 

The article is the result of a post-doctoral research work in which suggestions were presented for the development of sports tourism with regard to the dimensions of spirituality.