Socio-cultural impacts of tourism in Shahmirzad town

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.