Identifying the economic and social capacities of the nomadic community of western Iran (case study: Ravansar County)

In spite of many restrictions and deprivations, the nomadic community plays a key role in providing the raw materials needed by urban and rural communities. Animal breeding, production of handicrafts, protection and protection of borders are part of the capabilities of this industrious class. According to the geographical foundations governing the country, there are many differences between different regions in terms of the capacities of the nomadic community. Benefiting from the abilities of the nomadic community depends on identifying their capacities in different areas. Therefore, the main goal of the present quantitative and applied research, which was carried out with a combination of descriptive-analytical methods, is to identify the economic and social capacities of the nomadic community of Ravansar county. The statistical population of the research includes all the nomads of Ravansar county, among them 150 people have been considered as a statistical sample. Field data was collected through a questionnaire whose validity and reliability have been confirmed. To analyze the data, frequency distribution table, exploratory factor analysis technique, variance analysis test and Duncan test were used in SPSS software. The results of the research showed that six key factors have been identified as the most important economic and social capacities of the nomadic society and in total they were able to explain about 64% of the variance of the dependent variable. Among these, the three most important factors are: income generation and business boom (12.289 percent), diversification of economic activity (10.765 percent) and strengthening of social capital (10.667 percent). The results of the analysis of variance test showed that the F statistic with a value of 82.598 was significant at the 0.95 percent confidence level and there is a significant difference between nomadic communities in terms of economic and social capacities. The results of Duncan's test showed that the nomadic community belonging to the two villages of Badrabad and Gorgidar have the highest and lowest economic and social capacity with an average rank of 4.657 and 3.55, respectively.