Determination and Analysis of Enjoying Levels of Rural Areas of Iran; Using Numerical Taxonomy & Cluster Analysis Methods

To achieve development, the most complicated unsolved problem of the rural areas, especially in the third world countries, planning is an undeniable necessity. Moreover, to succeed in planning, the first step is to study and to recognize the level of development, capacities, limitations and regional imbalances.Although attempts have been made so far to determine the level of development in Iran, which is itself an important point, but what the present study seeks to do is to concentrate on the matter of development in the whole country from rural programming standpoint regarding the most recent formal statistics of the country. As a documentary-analytic study, with regard to the available data and the level of the researcher's expertise, it has employed a combination of numerical taxonomy and cluster analysis methods applied to the rural areas of 30 provinces by the usage of 24 indexes of development.Findings in numerical taxonomy indicated that, in the first phase, Tehran and Sistan-Baluchestan, in the second phase, Qazvin provinces suffer from heterogeneity respectively. The ultimate results of the research are indicative of some kind of developmental gap in the rural areas of the provinces to the point that except for Tehran that was omitted in the first step, over 7.4% are averagely developed, 51.85% deprived and 40.75% are highly deprived. To control the results and to increase the co-efficiency and certainty of the findings, the rural areas were evaluated through cluster method too. In this classification, the provinces were classified into five homogeneous groups sharing common characteristics. The comparison of the two models conveys a relative similarity between the findings or in other words identification of the attained levels among the provinces.