Scientific Tourism Development: An Interpretative Structural Model for Iran's Higher Education Landscape

The current research was conducted with the aim of providing a model of factors affecting the development of scientific tourism in Iran's higher education system. The research method was a modeling case study. The statistical population of the research was the experts familiar with the field of scientific tourism, including the faculty members of Iranian universities, who were selected by purposive sampling of 37 people. The data collection tools included documents, interviews, and researcher-made questionnaires, and the interpretive structural modeling technique was used to analyze the data. In the first step, the factors affecting scientific tourism in higher education were extracted by reviewing the research literature using a systematic review method and also through interviews with experts and using the elicitation approach; and in the second step, using the 6-step Structural-interpretive modeling, the intended model was extracted. The obtained results showed that the 9 main factors affecting the formation of higher education tourism in Iran in influence order are: dynamic political exchanges with the world at the national level, the existence of macro-national policies in the field of academic interaction, facilitating the admission process in the political and administrative dimensions, the existence of economic and technical infrastructures for foreign students, the international language level of faculty and staff members and the structure of dynamic and accepting higher education, the existence of a sense of security in the social, security and political dimensions for foreign students and brand-making factors of universities, and presenting historical, cultural and religious attractions to the world.