**5. Discussion**

In the previous section, we showed how the methodology used in this research was able to detect the 10 topics around which clusters the scientific literature of agritourism and sustainable development. In this section, we show that further groupings are possible that give other interesting significance to the proposed topics.

#### *5.1. The Three Themes*

The 10 topics were further grouped into t themes by means of an agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure. The degree of relationships among topics was calculated considering the Pearson Correlation Coe fficient across the topic proportion for all paper, deriving from the Document Term Matrix obtained as the output of the LDA procedure.

Let pi,j (with i, j ∈ 1, k) the Pearson Correlation Coe fficient across the topic i and j, and Dkxk a Dissimilarity Matrix where each element D(i,j) = 1 − pi,j. We performed a hierarchical clustering procedure to obtain t = 3 groups of topics. We decided to cut the dendrogram where the gap between two successive combination similarities is the largest [87].

The evaluation of results coming from the LDA procedure, based on a subjective analysis of the authors, led to the identification of the three main themes in the analyzed literature and their relationship with the topics. We can state that the three themes, analytically calculated after an agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure, can overlap the three dimensions of sustainability as reported in Barbieri [22]. According to the aim of this study, we describe the themes as follows.

#### 5.1.1. Theme 1: Economic Perspective

This theme includes all papers that look at agritourism as a means to stimulate other local activities and to contribute to the economic growth of the rural community. Indirect positive e ffects can be generated for the entire local economic structure in terms of attraction of investments for common infrastructure. Agritourism activities are mainly established to favor business diversification, creating an alternative source of income to the farm. Agritourism activities represent an e ffective distribution channel for farm products and, if well managed, a way to develop new market niches. As a result of the subjective analysis, the authors retrieved that 107 papers in P addressed an economic perspective (even if not always exclusively).

#### 5.1.2. Theme 2: Environmental Perspective

To this theme belong all papers dealing with the ability of agritourism to contribute to preserving the original landscape and maintaining natural resources in order to protect the rural environment and its biodiversity. In this sense, all papers that report about the responsible use of raw materials and natural resources, as well as waste reduction, belong to this theme. In total, 46 papers in P addressed an environmental perspective (even if not always exclusively).

#### 5.1.3. Theme 3: Social Perspective

From the one side, all papers that inform readers about the rural traditions belong to this theme (e.g., dealing with the recovery of roots, folklore, and local traditions). From the other side, papers that aim to "educate" readers to avail fruition from the rural world belong to the theme as well. Furthermore, papers which highlight benefits of agritourism as a means to providing alternative job opportunities to family members also belong to this theme as well as papers highlighting the role of agritourism

activities in increasing women emancipation. Also, in this case, the subjective analysis found that 96 papers in P addressed a social perspective (even if not always exclusively).

#### *5.2. The Agritourism Sustainability Matrix*

As already stated, the LDA procedure lets us identify a grouping of the 10 topics in three themes that can be easily overlapped with the three dimensions of sustainability.

According to [42], another grouping can be proposed here for papers in P considering the level of analysis (focus and aims) of each study. After a subjective analysis by the authors, each paper was classified as "micro-level paper", when the research focus was a single agritourism farm, or as "macro-level paper", which studied the e ffects of sustainability on a region or the industry. This clustering led the authors to identify 53 papers in P that can be clustered as primarily micro-level studies, 91 papers as macro-level analyses while 48 examined both levels.

In the end, it is possible to relate the two clusterings of topics introduced in this section in the matrix showed in Table 3 that we name "the agritourism sustainability matrix".


**Table 3.** The agritourism sustainability matrix.

In Table 4, for each matrix dial, the number of papers in P which primarily dealt with that level of analysis and type of perspective is reported.

What we can learn from the results reported above can be summarized as follows:

The importance of setting up agritourism activities to reach sustainable development for rural areas is always more understood by scholars who authored both theoretical studies and empirical research on this topic. As shown in Figure 1, the number of papers dealing with agritourism and sustainability is constantly growing with the years, highlighting an increasing interest from the scientific community.

As reported in Table 3, studied topics cover all the three dimensions of sustainable development, according to the 3P concept in [40], at di fferent extents of the impact [42]. It is worth noting that while the economic and social perspectives are dealt with in four topics each, only two research topics present an environmental perspective.

What emerges from Table 4 is that scholars adopted mainly mono perspectives in their works with more than 60% of papers adopting a purely economic or social perspective. Multidisciplinary approaches are much less di ffused and generally are studies combining the social perspective with the economic ones as showed in Tew and Barbieri [28,45].

Although surveyed papers covered both the two levels of analysis, macro and micro, an in-depth look at Table 4 highlights that scholars were more interested in studying sustainability impacts at a macro-level. Comprehensive studies that analyze the e ffects of agritourism activities at both the two analysis levels are present as well, thus confirming the interest already shown in [31] to analyze the dual role of agritourism for both individual actors and rural community as a whole.

Overall, two main gaps emerge in the scientific literature to be filled in order to delineate a holistic view of agritourism and sustainable development:

The environmental dimension, which is the less covered by literature, both in mono and multi-perspective studies, should be addressed much more by scholars.

Few studies are present which have a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view capable of evaluating the impact of agritourism activities on all the dimensions of sustainable development for rural areas.


**Table 4.** Paper classification.
