Hojat Ollah Sadeghi, PhD in Geography and Rural Planning,Isfahan, Iran

Fundamental changes in tourism and the need for new economic thinking have pushed tourism towards creativity. Experts believe that the sustainability of tourism is in creative tourism. Therefore, in order to develop this approach in rural areas, capacity measurement based on creative tourism indicators is necessary. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the capacity of creative tourism indicators in rural areas as a case study in the villages of Dezpart County. The research method is descriptive-analytical and based on survey studies using a questionnaire. The statistical population of the study consists of residents of three tourist villages of Shivand, Dehno and Faleh, which amounted to 1463 people. Based on the calculation of Cochran's formula, the sample size was 304 people. The data collection tool was a questionnaire whose validity was confirmed by the elite community and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha with a coefficient of 0.81. The results of the creative tourism indicators test showed that all indicators were significant at the level of less than 0.05. The study of the average difference equal to 0.139 confirms that the rural areas of Dezpart have significant talent and capacities in terms of creative tourism indicators. Also, the test result at the level of indicators indicates that indicators of education (-0.861), local participation (-0.358), innovation and initiative (-0.348), communication technology (-0.960), services and Facilities (-0.618) and suitable infrastructure (-0.09) have a negative average difference and this indicates that these indicators have an unfavorable situation in the studied rural areas. Regression confirmed that more than 74% of the studied indicators can explain the variable of creative tourism development in the studied rural areas, while the handicrafts index with 10% and the participation index with 8% have the highest rate of explanation in the field of creative tourism.