Analyzing Effect of Social Capital on the Psychological Empowerment of Rural Women in Salmas Township

Nowaday, women's empowerment is one of the goals of development and it means increasing awareness, reliability, choice, skill and control power by them.  Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze the effect of social capital on the psychological empowerment of rural women in Salmas township. The research method was descriptive and correlation.The statistical population consisted of rural women in Salmas township located at West Azarbaijan. The statistical population of this study was 31996 rural women. The sample size calculated 382 via Krejcie and Morgan table. A multistage cluster sampling method was used to select the samples. The research instrument was a questionnaire which its face and content validity were confirmed by a panel of experts. The reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed via calculating the Cronbach's and the composite reliability coefficients. The findings of structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that social capital had positive and significant effect on the psychological empowerment of rural women. So that, this variable explained 34 percent of the variance in rural women's psychological empowerment.