A Study of the Relationship between Political Socialization and Women's Political Participation in Ahwaz, Iran Using Structural Equation Modeling Approach

This study has been conducted to investigate the relationship between political socialization and political participation among women in Ahwaz, Iran. The statistical population of the study included all the women aged 18 to 64 in Ahwaz from among whom a sample of 384 women was selected using the proportionate stratified random sampling method. This is an applied research work in terms of purpose, and it has been carried out using the descriptive-survey method. The required data were collected using a questionnaire. The results indicated that the variables political socialization, age, ethnicity and social class are significantly related to the variable political participation. The results further revealed that the variables ethnicity and social class affect the variable political socialization. The structural equations modeling results showed that, in evaluating the model measurement section, the factor loadings of all measures related to the variables political participation and political socialization are higher than 0.4. Therefore, it can be said that, in the context of the indices of the concealed variables, the measurement model is sufficiently reliable. Cronbach's alpha coefficient and the composite reliability (CR) were greater than 0.7, and the average variance extracted (AVE) of political participation was greater than 0.5, and that of political socialization was 0.5. Therefore, the measurement model has acceptable reliability and validity. In the structural model section, the fitting indices including the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) with a value of 0.7, incremental fitting index (IFI) with a value of 0.91, comparative fitting index (CFI) with a value of 0.91, parsimonious normed fitting index (PNFI) with a value of 0.62, parsimonious comparative fitting index (PCFI) with a value of 0.64, parsimonious goodness fitting index (PGFI) with a value of 0. 57 and normed chi-square index with a value of 3.368 indicated that the model has an acceptable fitting value. Given that the absolute value of T-statistic for all hypotheses was higher than 1.96, all the research hypotheses were confirmed. Therefore, it is confirmed that the effect of political socialization (Beta ₌ 0.15), age (Beta ₌ 0.18), social class (Beta ₌ 0.15) and ethnicity (Beta ₌ 0.10) on political participation and the effect of social class (Beta ₌ 0.14) and ethnicity (Beta ₌ 0.19) on political socialization is meaningful.