evaluating rural community attitudes towards tourism development, according to structural equation model (case study: mountain areas of roodbar ghasran, shemiran)

introduction this study examines the attitudes of residents toward tourism in rural mountain communities in roodbareghasran district (shemiranat, tehran). the objective of this research is modeling host community support for tourism development and the potential of participation based on the factors found to influence reactions towards it. understanding local communities' attitudes toward tourism development is vital for the success and sustainability of any type of tourism development. a large number of studies have examined resident attitudes as well as and the factors that are likely to influence them. most of those studies suggest that the locals tend to have positive attitudes because they see tourism as an economic development tool and personal benefit can affect attitude toward tourism. there have been suggested in many investigations that the resident's attitudes toward tourism may be directly related to the degree or stage of development within the host community. while residents may oppose one type of development, they may be more willing to support another type. thus a continuing assessment of locals’ attitudes for different types of development may be necessary to assure sustainability and to manage more critical aspects that appear as a tourism destination continues to develop.thus a continuing assessment of locals’ attitudes for different types of development may be necessary to assure sustainability and to manage more critical aspects that appear as a tourism destination continues to develop. methodology the research utilized social exchange theory as a foundation to formulate the questions of the research and the tests of structural equation model. using the literature of tourism supports model propose several paths that. the model consisted of five latent structures and nine hypothesized paths. by employing a questionnaire survey and focusing on a proposed development was conducted in a rural region with 270 questionnaires by rural residents. this research examines the path relationships between perceptions of benefits from tourism development, the positive and negative impacts of tourism, and the community satisfaction support of tourism development. data were analyzed by a structural equation modeling methodology utilizing a two-step approach. reliability analysis was used to evaluate the stability and consistency for measured items of each latent construct. results data for this study were collected from residents of 10 villages of case study. the results support six hypotheses but three of them rejected at p