Social Trust and Social Participation in Khvaf City

In order to realize a sustainable and comprehensive development, attention and emphasis on social participation is necessary. According to many researchers, one of the factors that play an important role in increasing social participation is social trust. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between social trusts, as one of the main components of social capital, with different dimensions of social participation. This issue is more important in developing and traditional societies such as the Iranian society, especially in Khvaf city, which have a special status and 123 kilometers of common border with Afghanistan, and religiously with Sunni and Shia religions. Local and ethnic identities are active in it. In addition, the youth population, high percentage of rural population, low employment rate and migration from villages to cities are the main characteristics of this city. The method of this research was survey and the data were collected using a multi-stage cluster sampling method. The population of the active population in the city of Khvaf was 55405 people and 380 people were selected using the Cochran formula. To analyze the data and test the hypotheses using the spss and Lisrel software, Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equation model have been used. According to research findings, the relationship between social trust and all types of social participation has been significant. In fact, the relationship of social trust with social participation is 0.52, which indicates the average relation between social trust and social participation. Therefore, there is a positive and direct correlation between social trust and social participation.