Investigating the Role of Police Stations’ Counseling and Social Work Departments in Promoting Police Societal Capital (Case Study: Mashhad Police Stations)

The police, inspired by past policies and in line with performing their legal duty of mediation, take measures to resolve the criminal phenomenon between the disputing parties. In this regard,police stations’ counselling and social work departments are involved in performing the duty. Therefore, the present research is aimed at investigating the role of Mashhad police stations’ counseling and social work departments as mediator in enhancing the social capital of NAJA.

The present research, in terms of purpose, is of applied type; in terms of depth it is expansive and in terms of implementation and research conditions control, it is a survey using a questionnaire as a measurement tool. Given the subject, the present study has two different statistical populations.The first statistical population consists of the experts of counseling and social work departments of Mashhad police stations, in order to determine the organizational performance to achieve theoretical saturation (30 people), and the second statistical population consists of the clients of counseling and social work departments of Mashhad police stations. In this stage, the volume of the sample was determined to be 162 persons. Multi-stage cluster sampling method was utilized, and 8 police stations performing under supervision of 4 major police stations were randomly selected and data was collected.

The research findings indicate that there are significant relationships between the variables presented in the research hypotheses. Therefore, there is a significant relationship between the independent variables of the performance of police counseling and social work departments, the level of satisfaction from service utilization and clients' satisfaction with services and the dependent variable of research and police societal capital.

The results of the research show that the remaining variables in the regression model, including the variables of performance of police counseling and social work departments and client satisfaction with the services of police counseling and social work departments, have the most impact on the police social capital variable, respectively. And based on the amended definition, they have managed to explain 23% of changes in police societal capital.