Prioritizing and Measuring Barriers to Tourism Development with Emphasis on Cultural Barriers of the Case Study: Ardabil Province, Iran

The purpose of this study is to prioritize and measure barriers to tourism development in Ardabil province with emphasis on cultural barriers using Vikor decision making technique. In this research, after theoretical explanation of the topic, it was tried to use any method that contributes to the validity of the information and the results. To accomplish this goal, in this research, statistical decision making and deduction methods were used to compare the findings with the theoretical model of research. Therefore, this research is an applied and exploratory research based on purpose type, and statistical analysis of hypotheses test was performed using Excel and SPSS softwares. According to the findings obtained from the analysis and summarization of Vikor's model on tourism development barriers for respondents, the factor of cultural barriers (0.000) was identified as the first influencing factor and next priorities were identified as social capital (0.106), institutional barriers (0.373), social barriers (0.388) and individual barriers (1), respectively. The results showed that from the viewpoint of tourists, the correlation coefficient of tourism development with cultural barriers, institutional barriers, social barriers, social capital and individual barriers were 0.439, 0.659, 0.644, 0.583 and 0.01, respectively. The last relation is not significant. The results of regression analysis showed that the three variables of institutional barriers, social barriers and social capital explained 58% of the dependent variable changes. The results showed that the standardized coefficients of significant variables in the equation were 0.396, 0.143, 0.352 for institutional barriers, social barriers and social capital, respectively, and for one unit change in each of these coefficients, change or succeeded will be resulted in the dependent variable as much as mentioned values for coefficients and cultural barriers is considered the main barrier to tourism development in Ardabil province.