Investigating Women's Sense of Social Security and Factors Influencing it in Mashhad in 2006

The current study aims at investigating women’s sense of social security and factors influencing it in Mashhad city in 2006. The population of the study includes women above 15 years old from 12 different districts in Mashhad. The sample size, based on cluster sampling technique, was 360 persons. Sense of security is having mental peace against those dangers and problems which threatens a person’s daily life. In this research, the mean score for women’s sense of social security based on a five-point likert item was 2.60 which is below middle point of the scale. The result of the multivariate regression analysis shows that following factors (independent variables), based on order of importance, predict dependent variable which is women’s sense of social security: “mass media users” with beta coefficient of 0.346, “attitude towards Hijab” with beta coefficient of 0.36, “urban design” with beta coefficient of 0.298 and “self concept” with beta coefficient of 0.181 have a positive correlation with the dependent variable of the study. However, other factors like “being a housewife” with beta coefficient of – 0.125 and “having social support” with beta coefficient of -0.123 have negative effect on the dependent variable. The independent variables of the study altogether explain 54 percent of the variance observed in the dependent variable.