Designing an explanatory model of tourism ethics using grounded theory

Modern tourism has added to social anomalies by violating ethical practices and has caused many ethical problems to human societies. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to design an explanatory model of tourism ethics in Gilan province, as one of the most visited tourist destinations in the country, using qualitative research methods and systematic grounded theory. According to the research objectives, the population of participants includes university professors, officials, experts and policy makers of the tourism industry who have at least a master's degree and 5 years of executive work experience in various sectors of the tourism industry. The selection of these samples was done using purposive sampling method and semi-structured interviews with 7 general questions were continued until the realization of saturation in interview 12. Data analysis in three stages of open, axial and selective coding led to the extraction of 71 concepts, 19 sub-categories and finally 6 main categories from the integration and classification of concepts. Based on the proposed model, tourist's ethical behavior as a core category; social responsibility of the tourism destination as a causal condition; the values of the host society as context conditions; business ethics as interferer condition; tourism management and policies are considered as a strategy, and finally, ethical tourism is considered as a result of the implementation of strategies.