National and Ethnic Identity Tendency among the Iranian Turkemans

Turkemans is one of the ethnic groups who live in north east of Iran. The majority of them lives in Golestan and North Khorasan Provinces. About half of Golestan province population is Turkemans. At first, we try to measure national identity tendency among them. Second step is to measure ethnic identity among Turkemans. The main question of the essay is: "is there any relationship between national identity tendency and ethnic identity tendency among the Turkemans? For this aim, we made Likert Scale to measure those tendencies. 385 samples were chosen from five cities (150 samples from GonbadeKavoss, 100 from Bandar Turkeman, 65 from Aghghala, 45 from Kalaleh and 25 from Maraveh Tappeh) randomly. The indicators concerning the national identity are divided in to four dimensions: ancient cultural heritage, language, motherland and national history. The ethnic identity tendency is measured by the above dimensions. The results of the essay show that the Iranin Turkeman ’s ethnic identity tendency is higher than their national identity tendency. The correlation between their nation at identity tendency and ethnic identity tendency is .55 (Rxy =0/55).