Sociological Approach to Relationship between the Use of Virtual Social Networks and Tendency to Moral Deviations (Case Study: 15-29 year old Youth in Tehran)

This study focused on a sociological approach to the study of relationship between the use of virtual social networks and tendency of young people in Tehran city to moral deviations. In this study a survey method was used and the research technique was a questionnaire. The study population included all youth aged 15 to 29 in Tehran. Among them, 400 people were selected by Cochran and multi-stage cluster sampling. The required information was collected through oriented questionnaires and was processed by the software (spss & Lisrel). The results showed that Tehran's young people have a strong tendency to moral deviation. There is a significant relationship between the use of virtual social networks (independent variable) and a tendency to moral deviation (dependent variable) with dimensions of youth violence and aggression, the weakening of religious beliefs and expansion of intellectual doubts, normalization of relations between girls and boys, expansion vandalistic behavior, expansion of cohabitation rather than marriage. Furthermore, our path analysis indicated that in terms of the value of beta (β), a total of %48 of the changes in tendency of young people to moral deviations (R2=0/48), depends on the use of virtual social networks and demographic variables such as socioeconomic status, gender, age and level of education.