Identifying Social Factors Affecting Social and Cultural Alienation among Students Case Study of Islamic Azad University, Sanandaj Branch

This study aimed to investigate the social and cultural alienation among students of Islamic Azad University of Sanandaj. Alienation generally means negative orientation of conflicted feelings, feeling of meaninglessness, feeling of being withdrawn from self, and hatred toward social values. In this study, the theory of alienation, theory of social capital and theories of sociology of religion were applied to form the theoretical framework and the hypotheses. Using self-administered questionnaires, data were collected based on the library- survey method. The population of the study comprises all students of Islamic Azad University, Sanandaj branch. Using stratified sampling method, 392 students were selected from the related faculties. The results indicated that the social alienation of students based on indicators such as the feeling of powerlessness, self-alienation, cultural alienation and anomalies were less than the average; however, sense of meaninglessness among students was above the average. Furthermore, the average for the social capital, social satisfaction, religiosity and decision-making power was higher than the average while cultural capital, using global media (satellite and the internet) were lower than the average. The test results indicate that there is a weak inverse correlation between the aforementioned variables (all variables except for the student's use of the global media) and alienation of students. The multivariate regression analysis showed that these variables could determine 0.187 percent for the total variance of variables. The effective variables are decision-making power, national identity and cultural capital, respectively.