Abstract

Social capital can potentially be used for wrong reasons such as criminal activities, self interests and the creation of unequal communities. In this regard, the issue of developing communities raises concern because social capital has not sufficiently been researched and documented in rural areas of the developing world. The purpose of this study was the assessment of social capital between rural farmers in Behbahan County in Iran and identified effective factors on it. For access to this purpose, 20 variables that measured social capital by questionnaire were used. 205 farmers were selected by systematic sampling between 7314 Behbahan farmers. This sample was selected from 38 villages by random sampling method from 150 villages of the county. Results of this study showed that majority of the farmers have a low level of social capital. According to the result, there are positive correlation between farmers’ literacy, family cost, off-farm income, extension participatory, human capital, financial capital, physical capital and social capital between farmers. Also there are negative significant relationships between social capital indicators with variables such as; farmer’s age, family size, experience in agricultural activities and agrarian land. Regression results showed that the six variables as human capital, participatory extension, agrarian land, off- farm income, family cost, and physical capital entered into the equation model and these variables explained 56.7% of the variance of the social capital indicator among the farmers.

Key words: Social capital, farmers, indicator, normality test, Behbahan County, Iran.