Women's Awareness about Citizenship Rights and the Effective Factors on it

- Intro duction The issue of citizenship and how citizens make sense of the concept is increasingly the subject of social research. Citizenship as a multi dimensional concept, offers the capacity for an exploration of the dynamics of social division to take in a number of important dimensions (class, gender, race, disability, age and so on) when assessing both the levels and causes of inequality within a society. This research tries to survey women’s awareness about citizenship rights and the effective factors on it. 2- Theoretical Bases In this study, different views on citizenship rights and opinions of Marx (Class, conciseness and citizenship rights), Habermas (civil society and Public Sphere), Turner (Mass media role) and Parsons (Particularism – Universalism) were used to establish a theoretical framework and design research hypotheses including being a correlation between the degree of attending public spheres, socioeconomic status, usage of mass media and awareness about citizenship rights. 3- Discussion This is a descriptive measurement study using a questionnaire designed by the researchers. The study population was all the women employed in municipal offices at the time of the study. Estimating the sample size, we used a stratified cluster sampling method and Cochran formula were applied and 270 people were from current female municipal workers of Tehran in 2010. The data were analyzed by SPSS software. To complete the analysis Kendal's tau-b and Gamma tests, Chi-Squared test and multiple variable regression analysis methods were also used to analyze our data as properly as possible. The dependant variable studied in this research was the level of awareness about citizenship rights which was categorized to civil, political, cultural, social and gender-based rights. The independent variables included the degree of attending public spheres, socioeconomic status, and usage of mass media. The mean score of awareness on citizenship rights was 11.32 with SD=0.726. The range of scores was from 0 to 18. The study showed that 35.2% of participants in the survey had a low awareness of citizenship rights, 45.6% of them had a moderate awareness of citizenship rights and only 19.3% of the participants had a high level of awareness of the citizenship rights studied in this research. 4- Conclusion There was a significant correlation between the degree of attending public spheres, socioeconomic status, and usage of mass media, and level of awareness of citizenship rights which proved the hypothesis. Even by excluding educational level from the data analysis, there was still a significant correlation between the dependant and independent variables. According to regression analysis, the most important predictor of awareness about citizenship rights was the degree of attending public spheres. 5- Suggestions Citizenship and culture of citizenship are vintages of responsibility and commitments of different society elements such as state, private and public sphere that shape civil society. According to results of this study we fallowing recommendations are suggested: 5-1- Strategic education planning for women and other citizens about their rights, obligations and identities. 5-2- Strategic planning for institutionalization of citizenship rights and obligations in public and private sphere, studying citizenship values, reinforcement of universalism and civic ethics to increase awareness about citizenship rights to achieve active citizenship.