روزبه میرزائی

During the last decades, examining the factors that are likely to influence the perceived impacts of tourism has been a growing area of research. Mazandaran is known mainly as a famous tourism destination as well as the main center of rice production in Iran. Due to the geographical characteristics of the area, the local community is strongly dependent on natural resources, which in turn results in more environmental degradation. This paper aims to examine the impacts of socio-demographic characteristics on residents’ perception of tourism impacts in southern Mazandaran, north of Iran. The results indicate that most respondents were male, young, married, highly educated, and lived in the area for more than 15 years and their annual income was less than 7000$ and were not reliant on tourism income. It was found that gender, marital status and education were the discriminators of local communities’ perception of tourism impacts and age. Working in the tourism sector, income and length of residence were not significantly related to tourism attitudes. The results show that the respondents perceive negative environmental impacts higher than positive environmental and socio cultural and also negative socio-cultural impacts of tourism. Unexpectedly there were no significant differences between the perceived impacts of tourism based on reliance on tourism income, opposing to previous studies.