Deployment of social and cultural damages in Khorasan Razavi province

This article aims to identify social and cultural harms and threats of Khorasan Razavi province at county scale. The method employed in this study is secondary analysis, which gathered required data from national plans and Iran Statistics Center. Using these resources, required information were collected for 26 research indicators so the indicators were divided into three categories: demographic, cultural and social. By examining the indicator’s mean and Standard deviations, it was found that Torbat-e-Jam and Davarzan counties were under the most threats. In order to determine the indicators’ weight with expert opinion, hierarchical analysis was performed using Expert Choice software. So, it was found that, social, demographic, and cultural components had the highest importance, respectively. Using the final score generated by above method, the counties were divided into 5 categories with very low, low, medium, high and very high harmed areas, based on social and cultural harms. Neyshabur and Torbat-e Jammu counties had very high harm level, and Jovein, Firoozeh, Fareeman and Bajestan had very low level of harms. Through Pearson correlation test, it appears that social and cultural harms were not directly related to any of the characteristics of area, population, density, and distance to the center of the province.