فصلنامه روستا و توسعه
سال یازدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 43، پاییز 1387)

The aim of present study is to provide an appropriate model for assessment of life quality in rural areas. First, a definition of life quality is presented based on two subjects: human need and individual satisfaction. This definition considers life quality as a multidimensional concept which is a result of interaction between objective and subjective factors. Second, a set of minimum necessities for rural communities are identified which are required anywhere and anytime. Finally, a general model is presented for assessment of the quality of rural life based on human needs and accompanied by indices and descriptives for its assessment. The results indicate that the assessment of life quality in rural areas is a complex phenomenon and in its examination time and locational conditions should be considered simultaneously. Despite this, the proposed model has the potential to apply in different situations.

Tendency towards drug addiction among rural youth as a factor that contributes to the weakening of social capital of rural areas is an important issue that should be considered under the influence of the expansion of rural – urban ties and interactions and social pathology. The main issue of this paper is to examine the factors and contexts that drive the rural youth towards drug abuse and also its prevalence among them in Ahvaz county. The method of this study is survey and with a sample size 0f 500. Findings of the study suggest that orientation towards drug is relatively high. The growth of unemployment, easy access to drug, and contact with drug addicts have encouraging impacts, while the feelings of comfort, self respect, religious orientation, and family involvement proved to be preventive.

One of the most effective factors in the success of rural ICT centres is the adoption of ICT. Several factors can influence the adoption of ICT as an innovation. This paper tries to answer this question that whether the personal characteristics, socio-economic conditions, and informational-communicational situations of users and their families and also the innovation features can affect the degree of ICT adoption in Gharnabad village. We used survey methodology in addition to library and internet research. The correlation and multivariate regression analysis indicated that the degree of ICT adoption is positively related to age, level of education, gender, marital status, life style, user's level of computer skill or knowledge, number of individuals familiar with computer usage in the household, number of individuals with a ministerial position in the household, the level of education of senior daughter in the family, family's motivation of using ICT as a job and job finding means, ICT complexity, perception of ICT, visibility of ICT advantages, and the level of using written media, and these relationship were significant at the 99 percent confidence level. It has a negative relationship with the level of family incentive of using ICT-whether for user entertainment or filling the leisure time- and the level of mother education, and these relationships were significant at the 99 percent confidence level. The level of adoption's relationship to other variables at 95 percent confidence level was also specified. Another finding of this study was the estimation of the level of importance of these variables- negative or positive.

One of the most important debates in Iran is related to the development of towns as a basic initiative for the development of rural areas and prevention of the burgeoning of urban problems. Considering this and the functions and relationship between towns and agriculture, the main question of this study is whether the rural-urban transformation can be counted as a step towards the strengthening of agriculture or its weakening. In this study we selected Ezhieh town as our study site which has been transformed in to a town in 1996. It is situated in plain part of Esfahan county. The paper studied the agricultural situation there and its peripheral areas. The findings indicated that although the transformation of rural areas to towns has created some problems for livestock producers, but it has no impact on the size of agricultural lands. This practice would lead to the stabilization of population and absorption of peripheral villages. Increasing the number of young and literate people in the agricultural sector have positive impacts such as youngness of population and improvement of literacy among labour force in this sector. In total, the advantages of rural-urban transformation are more than its disadvantages for agricultural sector.

By definition, productivity is the optimal allocation of resources for the realization of maximum quantity of output. Methods to calculate the productivity of factors of production can be divided into two main categories: parametric and non parametric. According to the fourth development plan all the economic sectors in the country are responsible to contribute to the growth of GDP through the productivity of total production factors. In this study we used non parametric techniques of linear programming and Tornqvist index to evaluate the growth of productivity in agricultural production factors in Iranian economy during the period 1971-2005. The findings indicated that the annual growth of factor productivity in the agricultural sector was equal to 0.73%, which is significantly different from the goals of the fourth plan that was 2.2%.

The present study is an attempt to identify the factors that affect the participation of wheat growers in wheat program. The research method is casual-comparative survey. The statistical population is all the irrigated wheat growers covered by the project in Tehran province. The results of study indicated that there were significant differences between wheat growers covered by the project and those outside it with regard to their average personal, professional, and socio-economic characteristics. It also showed that the discriminate function can classify the two groups of farmers very appropriately.

A serious and in depth study is needed to examine the rural areas in the South Pars Installations zone, so that on this base programs appropriate to the potentials and existing possibilities of rural areas are designed and implemented. On this line, this paper attempts to measure the relative level of development and to identify development gap between the sub districts in the area with respect to their endowment from socio economic indices in South Pars Installation zone. The study applied Morris and numerical taxonomy models to identify the level of development and 65 indices were selected in different socio-economic areas at subdistrict level for the year 2006. The variation coefficients were used to study the inequality in rural development and the level of dispersion of the indices. The findings indicated that 15.4 percent of subdistricts were situated in well endowed, 38.5 percent in relatively endowed and 46.1 percent in deprived areas.

This paper examines the level of country's development with respect to the main indices of agricultural sector and its main purpose is to find the level of gap among provinces and the type of deprivation of each province. The statistical population of this study includes all the provinces of the country. The 18 indices used in this study emphasized the management of province resources with respect to agriculture. The most important findings are that the gap between the provinces is very deep regarding agricultural activities and reaches to fivefold. Khorasan, Fars, Mazandaran, Kerman, Esfahan and Tehran can be counted as more developed provinces, while Sistan-and- Baluchestan, Hormozgan, Bushehr, Kohgilouyeh-and-Boyerahmad, Qom, and Chaharmahal-and-Bakhtiari can be considered as most deprived ones. The application of coefficient of variation showed that the highest difference is related to the index of the size of green houses and the least difference is related to the ratio of landless rural households.