Sociological study of the factors affecting the phenomenon of petty theft in the city of Hamadan1

The phenomenon of theft as a criminal act is one of the major problems of human societies, and the police are always looking for a way to identify effective measures in the field of theft prevention to provide a targeted solution. Therefore, identifying the root causes and contexts of this criminal act with applied studies can be effective in preventing theft. Therefore, the present study was conducted to identify the factors affecting the phenomenon of petty theft in the city of Hamadan.

In this research, a descriptive survey method has been used. The statistical population of this study includes thieves arrested by the knowledge of the Disciplinary Command of Hamadan Province, which were selected through available sampling and a total of 76 people were selected as a sample. Data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire of 115 questions whose validity was calculated by content method and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha of 0.92. To analyze the data, descriptive and inferential statistics such as; Mean, Kalmogorov-Smirnov test, one-group t-test and Friedman test were used.

The findings showed that the most important factors affecting theft are; Physical disorder with an average of 38.92, social control 26.02, companionship with criminals 21.19, religiosity 40.57 and anomie (abnormality) 18.42. Thus, the mean of physical disorder and social control based on the data was not significant, and according to the comparison of the mean, it was found that the mentioned variables w