Analysis of factors affecting women's social participation in sustainable development (Case study: Golestan province)

Participation is a right that should be provided to everyone and is one of the important foundations of social relations, and women, who are half of the society's population, can play an important role in the development of societies with their social participation. The aim of the present study was to identify and analyze the factors affecting the social participation of women in the sustainable development of Golestan province. The research method was applied and descriptive, adopting a mixed exploratory approach. In the qualitative stage, the statistical population was 10 university experts who were selected based on purposeful/judgement sampling strategy. In the quantitative stage, there were 378,422 women over 15 years old living in the cities of Golestan province, and the sample size was 383 individuals according to the Krejcie and Morgan table, who were selected based on simple random sampling technique. The Delphi method was used to identify the components of women's social participation, and the structural equation method conducted by Smart PLS3 software was used to analyze the relationships between the components. Lincoln and Guba (1982) criteria were used to measure the validity and reliability of the qualitative stage, and Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability were used in the quantitative stage. Delphi results showed that women's social participation in sustainable development includes 16 components (social cohesion, social dignity, hope for the future, social base, social security, generalism, social awareness, self-confidence, lifestyle, social class, use of mass communication tools, employment status, family democratic structure, income level, education and age). Also, based on the results of structural equation modeling, it can be said: the age component and the social cohesion component have the greatest and least impact on women's social participation in the sustainable development of Golestan province, respectively, by - 0.594 and 0.303.