Ranking of socio-cultural sustainability of tourism based on VIKOR model: Case study of tourism target villages of Noor city

Abstract

Sustainable development of rural tourism is based on a holistic approach to realization and continuance of development processes in the environmental dimensions of tourism target villages. Sustainable development can be achieved if the overlap is created between different dimensions. This means that each social system achieves a desirable level of sustainability to make it possible to judge sustainability. The community of tourism target villages has undergone extensive changes influenced by trends and policies of recent decades, but evidence shows that villages are moving towards unsuitability, and especially social unsuitability. The aim of the present study is to rank socio-cultural sustainability of tourism based on VIKOR model in tourism target villages of Noor city. It also aims to identify and design a network analysis process for determining the sustainable development of tourism, explain the links between elements and factors affecting sustainability using a descriptive-analytic methodology, and rank dimensions of rural tourism sustainability. The data were collected using library and field methods from 310 households that were selected as the research sample through Cochran formula. The results of the study showed that the protection of cultural patterns was ranked as the first sociocultural dimension (R=0.713, S=0.250, & Q=1), while awareness rising was ranked seventh (Q=0.000).