Investigating the mental patterns of experts in the face of post-corona ecotourism using Q methodology

In recent months, the world community has faced a major crisis called the Corona virus epidemic, which has negatively affected all economic and social systems, including ecotourism. However, the coronavirus epidemic has provided lessons for the future of ecotourism that, given these experiences, can be a step towards the development of ecotourism. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the mental patterns of experts in the face of post-corona ecotourism using Q methodology. The statistical population of the present study includes the center of trade unions of tourist guides throughout the country. The discourse space of this research includes credible internal and external dissertations and articles that an unstructured Q sample has been used to avoid bias in the research. 60 members of the community were selected as tourism and ecotourism experts to create an unstructured Q sample. Cronbach's alpha test, KMO index and Bartlett test were used to evaluate the validity and reliability of the research method. In identifying the mental patterns of experts, heuristic factor analysis and correlation matrix were used and the principal components method was used for the final extraction of factors. Finally, eight factors with a total explained variance of 71.899% were identified.