Examining the Relationship between Social Stratification and Social Sense of Security among Residents of Ardabil

The present study aims at investigating the relationship between social stratification and social sense of security among the residents of Ardabil in 2011. Social stratification is a general term to describe regular structures of social inequality and social division of labor in complex societies, in other words, hierarchical classification, and unequal distribution of material and symbolic rewards. The sense of social security as psycho-mental matter is strongly influenced by social status in the social hierarchy. Sense of security refers to the people’s relief from stress, fear, and danger. This study has been conducted in correlational research survey method the sampling has been done in multistage cluster method. The sample size was 380 households. LSD post hoc test was used to determine the between-group differences. The results showed that the most frequent stratification was for the middle-class society with 57.7 percent. Also, the average of the sense of social security was 53.05 with the standard deviation of 10.51. The results showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between the income level, education level, employment status, level of financial-economic assets, housing, lifestyle, and the sense of social security. The findings also showed that the high-class social stratum has more sense of security than the middle and low class social strata. Finally, seven out of eight hypotheses were confirmed.