The Impact of Religious Tourism on Local Community Development / A Field Study (The Holy City of Kadhimiya as a Model)

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to demonstrate the impact of religious tourism on the holy city of Kadhimiya on its social, cultural, and economic development through expanding the Kadhimiya shrine in a way that accommodates a large number of visitors, in addition to expanding the surrounding streets, building large and numerous parking lots for cars, and establishing WC (water closet) sufficient for the numerous visitors. The study formulated numbers of hypotheses to find statistically significant differences at the level of 0.05 between the arithmetic and hypothetical (theoretical) means on the scale of the impact of tourism on the development of the local community in the holy city of Kadhimiya from the social, cultural, and economic aspects for all research objectives. The research relied on the descriptive approach using the social survey method to analyze the data. Several results were reached, the most important of which are:

To verify the second hypothesis, the scale was applied to the research sample, numbering (100) individuals. The results showed that their average score on the scale was 26.27 points, with a standard deviation of 3.68 points. When this average was compared with the hypothetical average for the scale, which was (18) points, and using the t-test for a single sample, it was found that the difference was statistically significant and in favor of the arithmetic mean. The calculated t-value was higher than the tabular t-value, which was (1.96), with a degree of freedom of (99) and a significance level of (0.05). The hypothetical average for the scale was extracted by adding the weights of the five scale alternatives, dividing them by their number, and then multiplying the result by the number of scale items, which was six ) items.