QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
Year:2008 | Volume:- | Issue:38-39|Papers Count:7

Computer games have been the first computer-based medium, which their prevalence in the last decades of the twentieth century has been astonishing. In fact, this medium has slowly become a potent rival of television, and has replaced it in the leisure time activities of children and the youth. This inquiry aims at studying the level of the youth s use of computers. Moreover, it studies the incentives, effects and backgroundAffects of the use of computer games. The method of this study was survey, and the population consisted the students of the first three years of all high schools in Tehran. Using multi-level cluster sampling, about 400 questionnaires were filled out by students.According to the findings, 80.7 percent of the respondents had been using computer games, most of whom (about 46 percent) had played the games daily or some days in a week. The findings also show that among the effects and incentives influencing the respondents' use of computer games were: education, releasing the restrictions of the real life, and peer group pressures. Generally speaking, those who use new media also, by and large, tend to use computer games.

Social capital is a complex and multi-dimensional construction or concept. It has different types, levels, objective and subjective aspects, causes and consequences, characteristics which have not been made explicit theoretically and empirically. The classical social thinkers only considered the content of social capital. Among the contemporary social scientists such as Parsons, Habermas, Giddens, and Castells, some of the components and indices of social capital are dealt with, and yet among some others such as Bourdieu, Putnam, Fokuyama, the exact concept of social capital has been discussed explicitly. The latter group has developed the theoretical dimension of social capital. The empirical dimension of social capital has been considered by the states, international organizations, and social researchers. But in spite of considerable theoretical and empirical works published, there remain many theoretical and methodological problems such as reductionist dualism, weak distinction between causes and consequences, and lack of theoretical integration of the empirical works.This article considers characteristics of social capital. A multi-dimensional scale has been developed its measurement, and an integrated theoretical model is offered for its analysis. All these as solution have been used to distinguish the types, levels, dimensions, and consequences and to define the main causes through multi-variant analysis. The results are presented as an applicable example for the measurement and analysis of social capital in Iran.

Limitations and obstacles for publishing newspapers in Iran has made the journal managers to turn to politicians and the wealthy for survival, who support the journals but demand special services from journals and newspapers. A dilemma is created here: if the journal managers accept, they need to forget the principles of freedom, autonomy, and professional ethics, and if they deny, their newspaper or journal will inevitably face economic or political crisis. Therefore, there are some intra and extra-organizational factors at work that make journalism in Iran to turn to some non-professional approaches. In this study, we are surveying the degree of consciousness of professional journalists on their non-professional approaches.

Refernce group tendency (RGT) is one the important subjects in which has been the field of study for both sociologists and psychologists. This article is a result of a research in order to investigate the relations of "structural openness perception (SOP) and RGT in frame of Robert Merton's reference group theory. Applying a new method named virtual-real comparative survey using two kinds of ordinary hard copy and electronic questionnaire is a kind of innovative in it. The results show non-local reference group is more welcomed in virtual environment than real. Structural openness perception (SOP) is in reverse relation with non-local RGT in both virtual and real environment. Farsi internet usage is also in reverse relation with non-local RGT in real environment but weal in virtual.

According to the "Management and Planning Organization Data", the main portion of Iranian Employed Women has been absorbed by public sector, and the number of women, who hired, increased in the past years. But, the comparison between the ratio of the employed women on the one hand and the ratio of the women's managers, on the other, shows that Iranian women have still a long way to develop.In recent years, the educational level of Iranian women has been improved, but the essential question is: Why didn't Iranian Employed women get suitable portion of the management posts?The main objective of this article is to find out the factors affecting discrimination between employed women and men at the universities in Tehran.Three hypotheses of this research, which have not been rejected according to my sample would be:Getting women's management posts has positive relation to women's status and situation at work.There is negative relation between Patriarchy and Women's Status and Situation:The suitable jobs and positions did not distribute between employed women and men at the same level and circumstances.

This paper is a comparative study of the level of attention of the Iranian members of parliament (MPs) to the 38 indexes of social welfare during the fourth (1369-1373) and sixth (1379-1383) Majlises. The method of this study was content analysis. The data for the analysis was gathered from 92 speeches by MPs, randomly selected from their addresses to the Majlis.The findings show little attention paid to social welfare issues, such as rising inflation, employment levels, provision of personal and social hygiene facilities, immigration trends, and the availability of infrastructural services to individuals and the social groups, by the MPs of both Majlises. Some differences observed in the attention of MPs to cultural clashes, social security, power-distribution mechanism and the level of personal liberties can be attributed to the differences inMPs political inclination and factions in the two terms of the parliament.

Anthropology, like other social sciences and humanities, has a deep and reciprocal interaction with the social context in which it functions. Technology, for example, has changed anthropology's subject and areas of interest. Moreover, it, along with epistemological changes, has helped some methodological changes such as revision in gathering, and presentation of anthropological findings. Following these changes there can be distinguished a wide range of approaches to anthropology. On the one hand, one could ask: Can we still think of anthropology as a useful and alive field of academic activity, while small scale communities are going to be totally disappeared? On the other, one can address many adaptations of anthropology with its changing context, where reflexive anthropological films, for example, embody creative tendencies and artistic activities among anthropologists.Giving a brief explanation of visual anthropology, its relation with traditional or written anthropology and some methodological concerns, this article introduces the very first Persian book on the subject, "Ethnographic Cinema". Despite the fact that the book is indeed a pioneer in this field, I shall argue that it suffers from some shortcomings: it highlights cinematic aspects at the cost of anthropological aspects; it does not deal with some basic points which authorize different approaches to visual anthropology; and it suffers from sociologism.