مطالب

Today tourism has become so important that it is regarded as the biggest industry and annually millions of tourists travel throughout the world with different motivations. Basically, it is necessary to have a clear picture of perceptions, expectations and requirements of visitors in order to stabilize the markets and provide the most effective goods and services. Tourism acts in a framework of certain spatial patterns. One of them is urban tourism. Urban areas are among the important tourism destinations due to their historical and cultural attractions. The cities have diversified attractions such as museums, historical architecture and places associated with prominent persons and important events which themselves attract many visitors. This approach points to generic characteristics of a place, such as natural beauty, climate, traditions, or social features. The second approach considers the spatial nature, capacity and being temporary of attractions in their segmentation. And the third approach encompasses the classification of attractions based on tourists’ perceptions and experiences

The present study is an attempt to evaluate and analyze the socio-cultural impacts of tourism in Shahmirzad town from the perspective of its residents. This research is applied in terms of objectives and is considered to be a survey in terms of nature and methodology. In the present study, questionnaire is used as an instrument for data collection. The population of the study consisted of people aged above 18 years residing in Shahmirzad town. Simple random sampling was used to select 200 samples from the population. The hypothesis testing results showed that tourism is associated with both positive and negative Socio-cultural impacts in this town. The relationship between these variables turned out to be significant (p=99%). According to the respondents, the mean score of positive and negative social impacts of tourism as well as the mean score of positive and negative cultural impacts of tourism are about 27.17, 31.61 16.81, and 16.21 respectively. According to the results, the negative social impacts of tourism and the negative cultural impacts of tourism account for the highest and lowest average scores respectively. The results show that men, as compared to women, have more negative attitudes towards cultural impacts of tourism. The results also showed that there is a negative correlation between the education level of respondents and their negative attitudes towards cultural impacts of tourism. There was no significant relationship between respondents' age, income and their attitude towards positive and negative social impacts as well as the positive and negative cultural impacts of tourism.