A Survey on Life Style and Relevant Social Determinants in Students of the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences

Lifestyle is one of the important contemporary concepts.. It is a part of life that happens in reality and includes a full range of activities that people do in everyday life. In this study, different types of lifestyle of students of the University of Social Welfare & Rehabilitation Sciences and the social determinants affecting it were studied. Considering the topic, different types of sociological theories of different sociologists such as Veblen, Simmel, Bourdieu, Putname, Giddens, Chaney, Fazeli, Patterson were investigated as well as psychological theories of people such as Ericsson, Adler and Kurt Lewin.
313 undergraduate, master’s degree and PhD students participated in this survey study. Sampling was conducted using Cochran sampling formula and stratified probability sampling. The Survey instrument was a researcher made questionnaire. After conducting a pre-test with 30 questionnaires and confirming the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, the data were collected and analyzed by SPSS Software. Lifestyle was studied in 4 categories of body management, health, consumption and leisure time and in terms of lifestyle features, students were divided into 3 groups of traditional, modern and combined. In order to test the hypotheses, Pearson correlation coefficient, T and F independent tests, multiple regression and path analysis were used.
Findings: The findings demonstrated that among the variety of lifestyles (modern, traditional and combined), the majority of students (60.1 percent) had a combined lifestyle. Also, the results showed that education, age and social capital were significantly correlated with lifestyle, while the correlation of employment status, duration of stay in the city and gender with dependent variables was not statistically significant. Regression coefficients indicated that the lifestyle was directly and positively influenced by social capital and age(age variable with ß= 0.21 and social capital variable with ß= 0.15 have the greatest impact on the independent variable).
Although other independent variables (employment status, education, gender and duration of stay in the city) indirectly had marginal influence on their lifestyle, their total impact on the independent variable was negative.
This study showed that with increasing age (between the ages of 20-50) the students’ lifestyle becomes more modern and among the social determinants, age has the greatest impact on the lifestyle. That is, the older they get, the more diverse their needs become and as a result their lifestyle will be more modern. Therefore, it seems that besides the mentioned determinants, other determinants play a role in forming the students’ lifestyle. Moreover, among the variety of lifestyles (modern, traditional and combined), the majority of students have a combined lifestyle which indicates that despite urbanization and modernity, maintaining traditional values among young people has its own importance and this can be the influence of our Iranian culture and religious teachings.