The Study of Moderating Role of Social Capital in the Relationship between Development of Urban Tourism and Sustainable Urban Development (Case Study: Zahedan)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study moderating role of social capital in development of tourism and sustainable urban development in the city of Zahedan. We prepared a questionnaire with 30 questions; and based on Cochrane’s sample, we distributed 114 questionnaires among managers of Tourist Organization and hotel managers with a random sampling. Based on these results, Zahedan city does not have a good situation in sustainable development. For testing the hypotheses, single-sample T-test, Pearson’s correlation and hierarchal linear regression were applied. Also the result of testing hypotheses indicates that there is a positive relationship between tourism development and sustainable urban development. In addition, the third hypothesis test showed that social capital had a moderating role on the relationship between development of tourism and sustainable urban development so much that based on hierarchical linear regression test, 25% of the variance in sustainable urban development is explained by the moderating role of social capital.