Assessing the Social Capital Indicators Affecting Tourist Satisfaction (Case Study: Masuleh Town)

The present study seeks to examine role of social capital in satisfaction of tourists. To achieve this objective, the concept of social capital based on three indicators has been evaluated: perceptions, structural and communicative. So that the effects of each of the listed indicators on tourists satisfaction index (physical-spatial, functional-structural and content) were evaluated. The research method is descriptive and analytical type. 384 questionnaires were completed among tourists in the town of Masoule. To evaluate the satisfaction level of tourists, canonical correlation and Friedman test method is used. The results indicate that in the dimensions of social capital, cognitive component has the best performance from the tourists. Content components are allocated to the greatest satisfaction of tourists (including social and cultural issues of the Masoule people). After evaluating each element of concepts of social capital and satisfaction of tourists, Most effectiveness of each one of the components of social capital(perceptions, structural and communicative) as an independent variable on tourist's satisfaction(Physical-spatial, functional-structural, content, socio-cultural) was evaluated. It is observed that although the cognitive component of social capital has a significant impact on tourist’s satisfaction but it has not a significant impact on the physical-spatial factors. In other words, the cognitive component has significant impact on structural- functional aspects and content components (socio-cultural) and communicative- structural components have also significant impact on satisfaction. But the most impressive according to the percentage of variance explained by the effect of cognitive component of social capital on the content component (social-cultural) is satisfaction.