The Relationship between Religious Identity and the Feeling of Social Exclusion among Students

Even though it can be argued that inequality, distance, and social exclusion have always existed across societies, one can not ignore reflecting on the reason why and how it is created together with its consequences for today’s various groups and social systems. The aim of this study is to explain the relationship between religious identity and the feeling of social exclusion by considering the mediating variable of social distance between two groups of Shiite and Sunni students. The statistical sample includes 279 graduate students of the faculties of social sciences in the three universities of Allameh Tabataba’i, Tehran and Beheshti, in which Sunni and Shiite students were chosen through snowball method and random selection, respectively. The findings indicate that the mean values of feelings of social exclusion, social distance and religious identity among Sunni students are higher than Shiite ones. Also, there is a direct relationship between the level of religious identity and the feeling of social exclusion, and the same is true for social distance and the feeling of social exclusion. Multivariate regression analysis reveals that the variables included in the equation have been able to explain a significant part of the variance of the changes related to the dependent variable. The results of path analysis also demonstrate that the variables of religious identity, ethnicity and social distance are related to the feeling of social exclusion.