Analysis of factors affecting the improvement of social capital in rural settlements (Case study: Esfandagheh district, Jiroft county)

Social capital is a sociological concept that has been increasingly used by social scientists. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to check the factors affecting the improvement of social capital in the rural settlements of Esfandagheh District. Based on the mentioned challenges; The basic questions of the research are: 1) What is the status of the rural settlements of Esfandagheh District in terms of social capital? 2) What is the relationship between institutional, social, individual and economic factors with the social capital of the villages of Esfandagheh District? And what are the most important factors affecting the improvement of the social capital of the villagers of Esfandagheh District?

The current research, in terms of the fundamental purpose and the way of conducting the research, is in the survey research group and according to the data, it is of the quantitative research type. In this research, 30 villages were randomly selected to determine the size of the random sample at the village level. Analysis of demographic characteristics and aggregation of questions to enter the model, and analysis of the structures and relationships expressed in the theoretical framework were performed using path analysis software. Finally, Cronbach's alpha value of 0.79 was got for the present study. Therefore, the value of alpha got in this research is reliable because it is close to 1.

The results show that the status of social capital among the rural settlements of Esfandagheh District is unfavorable; In such a way that the got average of all social capital indicators is lower than the desired level. The social capital, with an average of 2.942, is lower than the desired state; Therefore, the social capital is in an unfavorable situation in the rural settlements of Esfandagheh District. This result with the findings of Galli et al., (2020); that if social awareness, social trust, social cohesion, social participation, organization and social groups and social network and institutional, social, individual and economic factors are weak in rural settlements, social capital will be in an unfavorable situation. It corresponds; Also, with the findings of Werna (2001) and Up Hoff (2016); who considered social capital as one of the important factors for improving the condition of rural settlements is also consistent.Based on this, it was found that there is a significant relationship between institutional, social, individual and economic factors and the social capital of villagers. Based on Pearson's correlation coefficient, the results show that there is a significant relationship between individual factors and different indicators of social capital at the level of 0.01. This result with research (Adebayo, 2014); according to which there is a relationship between the institutional, social, individual and economic factors of villagers and social capital; It is aligned. Besides this, the most fundamental factors affecting the improvement of social capital among the rural settlements of Esfandagheh District are institutional, social, individual and economic factors. Therefore, the results show that the significance level got for all institutional, social, individual and economic variables is less than 0.05, so the results can be generalized to the statistical population. Also, the results revealed that the most important factors affecting the improvement of social capital Institutional, social, individual, and economic factors. These results agree with the findings of Dorobantu and Nistoreanu (2012), that the most important influencing factors in the village are the institutional, social, individual and economic factors in order to increase their participation and improve the indicators of social capital in this direction.

In this research, the concept of social capital is studied as a tool for rural settlements. Therefore, if social capital is considered as an infrastructure for rural settlements, it can reduce the negative effects related to this category. Also, with the necessary and executive planning, improvement of individual, social, economic and institutional factors, it is possible to help the process of social capital of villagers in rural settlements.