An analysis of Social Capital and Environmental Sustainability: Gardeners’ Cooperative of Malayer County

Responsible behavior is a set of actions of people towards the environment that social capital is a fundamental construct about this behavior. Considering the importance of social capital in environmental sustainability, in this research, we seek to investigate the role of social capital in environmental sustainability. In the paradigm category, this research was a quantitative research that was conducted using a survey method. The statistical population of the research is the members of grape growers’ cooperative of Malayer County, whose number was 3000, and 341 of them were selected based on stratified random sampling with proportional assignment. The main data was collected using questionnaires and face-to-face interviews with the members of the grape growers' cooperative of Malayer County. Data collection in the social capital section was also done using the Aphof (2000) social capital standard questionnaire (2000) and a researcher-made questionnaire related to the assessment of environmental sustainability. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by technical experts and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha test and was 0.86. Different statistical methods were used to analyze the data using SPSS and PLS software. The results of fitting the model of the relationship between social capital and environmental sustainability showed that the structural dimension of social capital (36.2%) and the cognitive dimension of social capital (33.9%) directly explain the changes related to the environmental sustainability variable. Also, the final study of the results showed that there is a positive and significant correlation between the factors of the structural dimension of social capital and the cognitive dimension of social capital.