Abstract

Rural tourism is one of the most important strategies of rural development and at the same time, its environmental, economic, social and cultural sustainability is emphasized. Thus, this study aimed at assessing and analyzing the tourism implications for Ovan village of Roodbar Alamout region in Qazvin province of Iran. It was conducted in a descriptive-survey method. The statistical population was consisted of rural households in Ovan village (N=136); out of them, 100 household members were selected based on Morgan and Krejcie table. The research tool was a researcher-made questionnaire, the reliability of which was acquired by conducting a pilot study and calculation of Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (0.9). Data analysis was done through an exploratory factor analysis technique. The results revealed that the positive implications of tourism might be categorized into the eight factors including improvement of rural housing (11.76 percent), improvement of physical structure of the village (10.51 percent), cultural development (9.51 percent), health development (7.65 percent), economic development (7.20 percent), improvement of rural industries (7.11 percent), increase in awareness (6.55 percent), and employment generation (5.30 percent), which explained 65.62 percent of total variances; in addition, the negative implications of tourism were identified in the five factors including environmental visual pollution (14.52 percent), increase in social abnormalities (13.39 percent), destruction of natural resources (11.48 percent), change in use (10.80 percent), and change in local culture (10.15 percent), which explained 60.36 percent of total variances.