Iranian Journal of Sociology
Year:2008 | Volume:8 | Issue:4|Papers Count:9

The aim of this article is to describe the ethnic differences in fertility transition during 1972-2000, and to study the role of family planning and development programs on ethnic fertility convergence. This study is a secondary analysis. The statistical population includes 24 provinces of Iran and the analysis concentrates on four ethnic groups namely Farses, Turks, Kurds, and Baluchese. The research analytical and conceptual framework is composed of demographic transition theory, characteristics hypothesis, and proximate determinant model.The results show that ethnic groups experienced different fertility levels and trends as compared with whole country during fertility transition period. Moreover, ethnic groups differ in terms of the timing of fertility transition, the rate of fertility reduction during fertility transition period, attainment of replacement-level fertility, and continuing fertility decline. According to this study, ethnic fertility convergence in Iran is a new phenomenon that appeared in the mid-1990s. This study also shows that the fertility transition in Iran, like some other developing countries, has occurred in different developmental conditions. It seems that ideational change and social interaction is the factor that has changed the relationship between development and fertility.

Measuring religiosity has always been a concern of socio-psycho researchers on religion and many researchers have made their attempts in the construction of reasonable scales of religiosity. Although some constructed scales have been applied more frequently, there is no consensus on a proper measure. This paper launches two main questions, that is, if the application of different religiosity measures makes any difference in estimating of religiosity of the respondents, and also in the assessment of the relationship between religiosity and other variables? To address these questions, three religiosity measures developed and used more frequently by Iranian scholars applied in the same population, that is, a sample of 352 dormitory students of Semnan University in 2006-2007.The findings reveals: firstly, all three measures enjoy a high level of reliability and validity. Second, the level of the religiosity of the respondents is almost the same according to all measures and categorized as high. Finally, regarding the relationship between religiosity and other variables, the application of the measures makes any significant difference in the assessment of the relationships. The implications of these findings for further studies are discussed in the paper.

Islamic revolution of Iran, as a social event, brought about some changes, in the both theoretical realm and social facts.One of the most significant problems in social science is the question of influences between agency and structural factors in the revolution.Some sociologists emphasize on superiority of agency factors in revolution while some others consider the structural ones as more crucial phenomena.This paper aims to analyze the roles of and relationship between structure and agency in cultural explanation of the Islamic revolution and classify four types of cultural explanation.At the end, we would come to the conclusion that agency (as an actor) is a more signification variable than structure.

Based on the social mobility theory, behaviors, attitudes and values of people are affected by the previous social status (origin) and the current social status (destination). The social mobility is occurred if the previous social status of a person is not the same as the current social status. Diagonal mobility models have been proposed to study the effect of social mobility on behaviors, attitudes and values of people. In these models the behavior, attitudes and values are considered as response variables and origin, destination, social mobility and the other variables are explanatory variables. Using these models, we can study the effect of origin, destination and social mobility on the behavior of the people. In this article we consider the diagonal mobility models with ordinal response variables and we study the social class status of working married women in the Shahid Chamran University and Jondi Shapour University of medical sciences. Among different results, we can refer to the effect of age. Father's education level, income, husband's income, working statue of husband and social mobility on social class of women.

There are few works in Persian texts which consider the process of secularization, sociologically. Among them, two books written by Shojaeez and are remarkable samples, and offer to the readers valuable themes, such as indexes of secularization, contexts and factors of secularization, differences in secularization between Christianity and Islam, and theories of secularization. But these debates have certain difficulties. Some of them are methodological, as that the sociological approach to religion in definition, must consider common understanding, not personal one, or that the sociologist in secularization debate, must focus on people's understanding and practice, not on religious resources. Some other of problems is substantive. Such as the twofold division of religion, or that the contrast between religion and the world, is a necessary condition for secularization, or great emphasis on differences between theorems of Christianity and Islam, or concept of secular religion, or lack of sufficient notice to common mechanisms, or not to recognize "the types of diversity, and finally ambiguity of concept of "modernity as it is".