An Analysis of Social and Cultural Factors Affecting the Rural People’s Participation: A Case Study of Central District of Jahrom County

Participation is a consciously self-motivated involvement of individuals in a development plan and is also one of the crucial elements in rural development. The formation and continuation of this process in rural communities are affected by very different factors and conditions. Existing cultural and social values and norms in the rural communities are considered as one of the most important factors affecting the extent of rural people’s participation. This study aims at determining the participation level and the cultural and social effective factors in 25 rural settlements of the central district in the Jahrom county through a holistic approach within a descriptive-analytical and correlation method. Data collection is undertaken through a questionnaire by a sample size of 384 people, and the data is analyzed by using appropriate tests in the SPSS software. According to the results from t-student test, except for the indicators of “respect to others” and “fraudulent routines”, participation levels in most of the concerned indicators are significantly lower than the expected level. Ranking the cultural and social factors affecting the extent of participation indicates that the indicators like “importance of collective decisions compared with the individual ones”, “the people’s tendency to solve problems of the district” and “social communications”, which are supposed to enhance collective activities, have the highest share in the explanation of the people’s participation level. In addition, results from multi-variable regression show that the criterion of “social network” with a determining coefficient of 0.679 has the greatest impact on the participation level in the rural areas.