Social trust and its impact on social participation of Hormozgan University students

Participation is considered one of the most important issues in the research on social capital, so that its importance has been widely emphasized by various political and social theorists. Formation of student organizations and students’ participation in them are affected by various individual and social variables. The present study aims to investigate the extent of trust and its relation to social participation of the students of Hormozgan University. The Statistical population consists of all Hormozgan University students in 2013-2014 academic year, 250 of whom were selected through stratified random sampling. The method of this research was survey which was done using a questionnaire. In order to assess the validity and reliability of the questionnaire, content validity and the Cronbach's alpha coefficient were used. In this study, Putnam’s theory on social trust was used as the theoretical framework. The collected data were put into SPSS software to be analyzed. The results of the study demonstrate a moderate participation of the students, which is positively and directly correlated with social trust. In addition, the results of multiple regression analysis show that 39 percent of the dependent variables can be explained and predicted by the independent variable. The main finding of the current research is that trust in university officials is the most influential factor affecting students’ social participation, whereas students’ trust in teachers is deemed to be the least important one.