RESEARCH BULLETIN OF ISFAHAN UNIVERSITY (HUMANITIES)
Year:2005 | Volume:19 | Issue:2|Papers Count:12

The empowerment of women is one of the goals of the development which means increasing awareness and knowledge, self reliance as well as speeding women's freedom of selection by themselves. Some adherents consider empowerment as increasing the participation which is one of the factors of facilitating the empowerment. The theoretical method of women empowerment for participation in development is in relation with the feminist theories specially the Liberal feminist theory and the empowerment theory which is the outcome of feminist efforts in the third world countries. The present article is based on a research project conducted in Isfahan investigating factors which help the empowerment of  women. The findings suggest that factors such as enhancing education level, heath enhancement, granting financial autonomy to women, and eliminating discrimination in the job market are important actors in this regard.

The main aim of this study was to investigate some of the effects and consequences of socio-cultural changes on the generation gap during recent decades. Moreover, the youth and the elders are compared with regard to religiosity indicators and social values. The theoretical framework was based on Post-material theory presented by Ronald Inglehart. Based on the achievements of two decades surveys, Inglehart concluded that a change from material values to post-material ones has occurred in industrial modern societies. During this change while religiosity of the youth has declined, the trend toward post material values has increased in comparison with the elders. Two main hypotheses were  tested to study generation gap in this research: 1) there is a relation between the youth and the elders in total religiosity and 2) there is a relation between the value preferences of the youth and the elders. The instrument was a questionnaire comprising 64 open and closed questions and items. It was  performed on 220 people as the  sample in Dehdasht city in 1382. The two hypotheses of the research were proved. It means that there were significant differences between the youth and the elders with regard to the main variables of the study.

The aim of this study was to investigate the attitude of secondary students to marriage and to compare the results with those obtained in a similar study about three decades ago. The sample of the study consisted of 2446 girl and boy secondary students who were selected randomly from Shiraz and five other city of Fars province. In this study, student's attitude toward some issues of marriage and spouse selection were investigated. Marriage problems, aims of marriage, desirable age of marriage, individuality, family characteristics of spouse and desired number of children were some factors investigated. The results showed that adolescents tend to have more modality free in spouse selection and tend to increase in the age of marriage in the last decades. Also desirable number of children for future offspring was about 2-2.5 children.

There is no doubt that one of the most important functions of any educational system, especially in higher education, is training human experts and specialists according to the needs of society. Considering the importance of this issue, the present research has made an attempt to investigate the educational and job position of graduate students. Job position has been studied in relation to some variables such as job, sex, social position, marital status and way of finding a job. Moreover, the relation of way of finding a job is compared with other variables such as motivation, grade point average (GPA) and university course. In this research, the main instrument for data collection was a researcher-developed questionnaire with high validity and a reliability of about %92. The sample consisted of 133 graduated students who were selected by simple random method. On the descriptive level, central indicators and variation indicators were employed. On inferential level, indicators such as Chi Square, U Mann Whitney, Kruskalwallis and Factorial Analysis of variance were used. The finding showed that there are relations between job position and variables such as sex, marital status as well as, economic and social position. Finding a job is related more to job motivation and less to students' GPA and university course.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the relationship between values-system and creativity among the first-year students of University of Isfahan. The sample consisted of 100 first- year students whose age range was between 18-27 and were selected randomly through multi-stage cluster sampling. The questionnaires consisted of values test (Allport & Vernon & Lindzey, 1951) and Torrance’s creative pictural test (1975) as well as a demographic questionnaire. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between art value and total creativity from one side and the sub-test of elaboration and the sub-test of fluency from the other side (p<0.05). The correlation between economic value and sub-test of fluency was also significant (p<0.05). Also there was a significant negative correlation between religious value and sub-test of originality and theoretical value and sub-test of flexibility (p<0.05). The gender differences on the values and creativity were not significant.

Growing delinquent behavior such as drug abuse, alcoholism, illegal sexual relations, vandalism and run away from school among youths in the macro cities are regarded by sociologists. Urban sociologists like Park (1967), Savage and Wards (1993) and deviances sociologists like Lawson and Heaton (1999) and Reid (2000) studied the tendency of youth to delinquent behavior in the view of disorganization. Lewis (1998) believes that asylum and the culture of poverty are together and states those who experience the culture of poverty probably will be involved in delinquent behavior. In this research, a survey method with self-report data is used for collecting those demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the subjects, the culture of poverty components and tendency to delinquent behavior. This study aims to investigate the affects of the culture of poverty indices on youth tendency to delinquent behavior. Population is those who were living in the Dehpealeh as an asylum area in Shiraz city during the study. An area in the south of Shiraz has been selected as comparison group. Results from two ways ANOVA show significant relations between asylum and the culture of poverty components like disinclination to saving, tendency to isolation, tendency to delinquent behavior in the interaction between asylum and the culture of poverty components.

This paper is based on a research project on Clerics' organization in Iran. In the theoretical section, the researcher explains the important elements in Clerics' organization and in the methodological section, the Participation Action Research Method is introduced. The third section deals with the results of the survey conducted in Mashhad and Qum Seminaries. Based on the results, the order of internal problems is 'economic', 'cultural', and 'educational' problems.

Reliability of measurement instruments in social research is one of the important methodological subjects. Without reliability, the researcher can not be assured to results of empirical studies. Internal consistency between items and Cronbach alpha coefficient that is based on, is more popular method for testing the reliability of the instrument. This paper deals with Cronbach Coefficient Alpha and its applications in social science. Some of the key issues dealt with are: (1) low coefficient does not necessarily mean lack of reliability; (2) Cronbach alpha is suitable for one-dimensional instruments, and if the instrument is multi-dimensional, the researcher must compute the coefficients for every dimensions separately, and (3) the relation between Cronbach alpha and some others techniques and range of the coefficient.

Having social skills is one of the essential necessities in nowadays life. This necessity especially for the adolescence is more obvious. Considering this, the function of school and teachers is very important. Considering the importance of learning social skills in sensitive years of growth, evaluation of teaching of these skills is necessary. The main aim of the present study is to develop tools for assessing social skills. To accomplish this, among the different ways of social skills evaluation, the supply of social skills check list was selected. With a wide-spread study of almost the whole related areas, 369 items from social skills in 9 sections and 38 subscales were collected and classified. The content validity of this check list was determined by experts from the psychology and education faculty. To determine the reliability, inter-rater reliability was used. This tool can be used for the counselor's use and search performance with the same subject. It is recommended to prepare a self-measurement questionnaire of some scale and sub-scale for the evaluation of students' social skills from this check list.

The way in which group members allocate valuable resources among themselves is an important determinant of organizational morale. Researches have shown that equity in reward allocation is preferred to equity when the goal of distribution is to create consistency and avoiding conflict. It is expected that three groups of people enjoy resource allocation more than others: females, distributors with high input, and distributors who have learned how to maintain their internal consistency. In this study, reactions of 304 undergraduate students of Isfahan University to a hypothetical situation with equal and equitable distributors and with inputs and genders as criteria were examined. Findings showed that there exists a normal interaction in distribution while respondents of both gender preferred more resource allocator with high inputs when act on a norm criterion and females have a higher reaction than male to this procedures.