Conceptual explanation and validity evaluation of reconstruction indicators in rural areas

Today, the term rural reconstruction has become one of the most important topics of rural studies with the speed and continuity of changes in rural areas. Rural reconstruction means spatial-spatial reproduction, revival or physical-physical, cultural, social, strategic changes in villages. Reconstruction can be seen as the result of many causes and micro-macro factors such as development plans, ruling policies, migration flows, development of technologies and communications, environmental changes, globalization, tourism development over time, which brings changes in spatial structure and functions. In this regard, several studies have been carried out in the field of reconstruction. In many of these studies, reconstruction has been considered in the sense of structural changes, restoration, regeneration, and revitalization from an economic perspective, which is due to the novelty of the topic and the complex process of reconstruction. The reconstruction of rural areas includes different dimensions, therefore, in this research, the attempt to develop a theory that can include all dimensions of reconstruction has rarely been made. It should be noted that the reconstruction deals with the overview of the structural and functional changes of the village and its issues, so the positive feature of this perspective is avoiding one-dimensional and one-sided thinking. According to this feature, it is possible to examine various elements in this whole unit, which have been less paid attention to in the reviewed studies. The main goal in this study is to provide systematic and systematic indicators to operationalize various aspects of reconstruction according to the conditions of rural areas and their changes over time so that researchers, practitioners and planners of rural issues can use these indicators in their studies. Take advantage Therefore, the key and central question of this article is: What are the important and effective indicators in the reconstruction of rural areas? And according to the conditions of rural areas of Iran, are these indicators valid according to academic experts and executive experts?

In the current research, in order to obtain important indicators in the field of reconstruction, firstly, due to the lack of official statistics regarding the number of the sample community of experts, people who had expertise in the field of geography, rural planning, Also, people who have done research on the topic or a part of it and were able to access them, were randomly selected to complete the questionnaire. In total, a list of 50 people was prepared and the questionnaire was given to all of them and finally 40 people answered the questionnaires. In order to weight the indices and criteria extracted regarding reconstruction, the respondents were asked to give points to each of the criteria based on a spectrum of 1-5. In order to prioritize the indicators, the mean, median, mode and coefficient of variation statistics were calculated. At first, to evaluate the average opinions of academic staff members and experts, a sample T-Tech test was used, and in order to validate and reach the consensus of the experts, in addition to the average statistics from Vicor technique, and to compare the views of two groups of academic staff members and experts from Mann-Whitney test was used. Also, in order to compare the opinions of two groups of faculty members and experts regarding the reconstruction indices of the T-test, two independent samples were taken at the level of dimensions and indices. Finally, the indicators were placed in the Vicor model for ranking, so that in the first step, the answers were entered into the Excel software and its matrix was formed. Then, in the second step, the numbers were calculated. Finally, the weight of 77 criteria was obtained based on Vicor's model and their ranking was done.

To check that the indicators used in each sector are suitable for use in rural planning and in practice they can be used in the process of planning and evaluating rural development projects, the coefficient of variation was used. Since the average of the answers does not necessarily indicate the distribution of the opinions of the respondents and it may cause wrong conclusions in the process of evaluating the indicators due to the existence of high variance among the answers, Therefore, the standard deviation of the answers was also taken into consideration so that the difference of opinion of the respondents was included in the evaluation of each index, and for this reason, the coefficient of change was obtained by dividing the standard deviation of the answers by their average. The Mann-Whitney test on indicators to determine the consensus status of experts showed that there is no consensus among 77 indicators in relation to 23 indicators, and these indicators have been found to be unsuitable or less important than other indicators for the reconstruction of rural areas. The results of the evaluation of the average dimensions of rural reconstruction from the respondents' point of view, using the one-sample t-test with a median value of 3 to evaluate the effectiveness of the indicators, showed that the value of the T statistic in all indicators is higher than the average value (i.e. 3), And the significance level of all dimensions of the variables, i.e. reconstruction, has a significance level of less than 5 percent, which indicates their significant effect in measuring and evaluating the target of the variable. Comparing the opinions of two groups of academic staff members and experts shows that the reconstruction structure is different in terms of dimensions between these two groups. The comparison between the opinions of two groups of experts and academic experts at the overall level showed that the structure of reconstruction is different between these two groups and the average of the group of academic staff members is larger than that of experts. The ranking of the indicators using the Vicor model indicates that the experts assigned the highest rating to the indicator "Improving the economic relationship of the village with the surrounding cities".

In view of the fact that in Iran still not much attention has been paid to the topic of reconstruction and the number of scientific researches in this field is very small, also since this issue has not been taken into account in development programs, especially the development of rural areas of Iran, therefore determining and introducing Indicators affecting the reconstruction of rural areas can pave the way for future development plans, and executive bodies and universities can plan the movement towards reconstruction in different dimensions using the introduced indicators, as well as those analyzed by experts.