- An Analysis on the Cultural Identity of the Female dorm StudentsA comparative study on the public and private dorms in Tehran

Identity is an important issue which in both social and cultural aspects can represent the existent situation of society. One resource of the identity changes especially in its cultural dimension is the experience of living in the new environments. This study has been done to recognize the formation of cultural identity among females who live in dormitories. The theoretical framework formulated on the basis of Peter Burger theory. The research method was qualitative and the studied women have been purposively chosen from the public and non-public dormitories of Tehran city. The findings show that in the public dorms, the religious girls were committed to the religious values and behavior and faced less identity challenges due to following a traditional-religious structure, but the non-religious ones felt less belonging to dorm, their familial identity have reduced and most of them had identity challenges. In the non-public dorms the religious girls had low integration with their dorms because of having different beliefs with their roommate and most of them identified themselves using both conventional values and modern values. But non-religious girls had mostly powerful familial identity, and have considered the dorm people as unreliable and not suitable for associating. This people have contradicted the traditional (i. e. religious, ethnic and local) structures and tried to develop an independent which was more similar to the western modernity but involved the doubts and paradoxes of modern identity too.