Assessment of socio-cultural sustainability of rural tourism development in East Azarbaijan province

The purpose of this research was to measure the socio-cultural sustainability of tourism development in the target villages of East Azarbaijan province so that the negative socio-cultural consequences of tourism can be moderated or eliminated and the positive consequences can be strengthened with proper planning and management, and finally to the sustainable development that The ideal point of the tourism industry is achieved. The research method in the present study is applied in terms of purpose, survey in terms of implementation and cross-sectional in terms of time. The statistical population of the study was heads of households in four tourism target villages in East Azarbaijan province (N=819), which was calculated using the krejcie-Morgan table, the statistical sample size of 265 people. The findings of the research showed that the socio-cultural dimensions of tourism in the studied area have a moderate level of sustainability with an average of 0.563. Also, the prioritization of the studied villages in terms of the level of social and cultural stability also showed that Ushtabin village with a score of 0.624 had the highest rank and Totah khaneh village with a score of 0.493 had the lowest rank.