Comparative Analysis of the Causes of Rural Underdevelopment: The Case of Villages in Margoon District of Boyer-Ahmad County

The aim of this study was to investigate the causes of rural underdevelopment in Margoon district of Boyer-Ahmad County. For this purpose, at the first step, developed and underdeveloped villages were identified using Scalogram technique. Then, three villages with high level and three villages with low level of development were chosen. In each selected village, 30 percent of heads of rural households were selected as responding group. Therefore, 225 heads of rural households had participated in this study. A questionnaire was used for gathering data and factor analysis, compare means and discriminant analysis were implemented to analyze the data. In this regard, factor analysis was used to measure internal consistency of the variables. The KMO index and Bartlett's test considered suitable for factor analysis. Factor analysis showed that 10 factors were extracted. Managerial, social, economic, attitude, fundamental, satisfaction, individual, participation, ethical, and financial factors. Factor analysis showed that the 10 factors accounted for 73.21 percent of the total variance. Also, compare means analysis showed that the status of social, financial, participation, fundamental, ethical and individual factors were significantly different between developed and under-developed villages. For determining the importance of each factor in separating two village groups, a discriminant analysis was used. Findings showed the fundamental (with weight of 0.662) and participation (0.471) factors had the most contribution to classify the two village groups.