Evaluation and obstacle identification of farmers’ livelihood-based perceptions of rural tourism development

In the context of the rapid development of rural tourism and ecotourism, farmers’ perceptions of tourism development greatly influence their livelihood decisions and their support for the continued advancement of tourism. Aiming at the problems of strong subjectivity of index weighting, insufficient description of perceived uncertainty and insufficient identification of constraints in existing research, this paper constructs a tourism perception evaluation and diagnosis framework that integrates entropy weight method, cloud model and obstacle degree analysis from the perspective of farmers’ livelihood. Using Jiangxi Province in China as a case study, this paper provides an empirical analysis of the perception structure and key barriers of farmers in the context of rural tourism development to validate the operational and applicability of this approach. The results show that the perception of tourism by farmers presents both positive effects and negative pressures. Economic pressures, environmental constraints, and insufficient income transmission are the main factors that limit positive perception formation. The proposed comprehensive assessment and obstacle diagnosis framework helps to expand from uncertainty perception measurement to restriction mechanism identification and provides a reproducible analytical path for the study of farmer livelihood perception in the context of rural tourism.