فصلنامه تحقیقات فرهنگی ایران
سال دوازدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 48، زمستان 1398)

One of the most usual people’s activities is to opine about the causes of daily life events. Influenced by instinctive motivations and social habits and doctrines, this activity may have some bias. Simplification and exaggerating in finding causes in different subjects such as sanitary, environmental, ethical, accidental and so forth, and thereby simplification in determining the culprit, can be derived from two things: an instinctive tendency to the compensation of the cognitive dissonance and escaping from a suffering due to the attribution of happenings to accidents or oneself own mistakes, and also from acceptation  of commonplace stereotypical explanations of social affairs inspired deeply by antagonist ideologies.  Simplification in finding of cause, finding of cause suffered at least by fallacy of part and whole, can push people to confronting those who are not unique or main cause of their misfortune. Doing so, there will be some expectations for society which lead to radicalism and distrust, a source of more suffering and les function. This article tries to show some sorts of this simplification in Iran’s culture, and states that there are mistake in motivations and danger in effects and implications. The extent of examples is a range of virtual sites based on news and comment which seem to be a representation of the average of cultural orientation of Iran.

This study aims to investigate the discourse about traditionalist women on a popular social media platform, i.e. Instagram. Therefore, ‘Tašt-e Šir’ video which was part of a television program about family values was selected as the case study. In this video, a family counselor, advised women to express their love and affection to their husbands through washing their spouse’s feet in a tub of water or milk. The video became very controversial and was distributed vastly on different types of social media including Instagram. The main question of the paper is the discourse about women that are represented on this video. In addition, this study seeks to understand the reception of Instagram users from this discourse according to the Hall encoding-decoding theory. Critical discourse analysis based on the Fairclough model was conducted to answer the first question. A qualitative content analysis was used to answer the second question. The results of the study show ‘traditionalist women’ being the dominant discourse on the video. The results also show that ‘oppositional code' is the dominant reception among Instagram users.

The media, along with the content they distribute, involve particular nature and structures that can transform patterns of thinking, behaviors, and emotions. With the emergence of social media and the increasing rate of human interactions in the virtual world, human emotions (including love) have been re-defined in this new space. This issue has been addressed by renowned theorists such as Giddens and Bauman. The present survey investigated the relationship between social/mass media and (liquid) love and the consequences of this relationship as perceived by Shiraz University students. To gather data, 386 students were selected through stratified, probability sampling and completed the copies of a researcher-made questionnaire. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were confirmed through Cronbach’s alpha and face validity. Results revealed that there was a significant relationship between virtual social networks, domestic and foreign media, and liquid love. Furthermore, the variables of virtual social networks, domestic and foreign media, and liquid love showed a significant relationship to attitude toward marriage. In the structural equation model (processed in Amos), three variables, namely virtual social networks usage, domestic mass media usage, and foreign mass media usage, respectively, left the highest degrees of impact on liquid love. Moreover, three variables, namely domestic mass media usage, foreign mass media usage, and liquid love, significantly affected attitude toward marriage with coefficients of 0.199, -0.113, and -0.414, respectively.

This paper aims to introduce a mixed research method for the analysis, reading, and interpretation of urban visual culture texts. To reach this goal, mural have been chosen as the most outstanding urban visual text. In order to do a case study, one of the outstanding wall-paintings located in Tehran`s Vanak square, has been selected to be analyzed by a mixed method. The analysis of the visual text has been done in two stages including semiology and discourse analysis. For the first stage, we used O`Toole`s semiotic method suitable for analyzing urban murals, and for the second stage, we employed Laclau and Mouffe`s discourse theory. Findings of the case study for the micro level showed that, key signifiers - as nodal points - of the text have been recognized as nature, city, man, and woman and the relationship and interaction between them have been distinguished in the form of binary oppositions such as nature (village)/city and man/woman. At the macro level, the main competitive discourses identified in the text, are Environmental Protection vs. Urban Sprawl and Masculism vs. Feminism, that are lively and actively in an antagonistic situation using their key signifiers. Finally, the dominant and hegemonic discourses through positive representation of their key signifiers can be considered as Environmental Protection and Masculism.

From a sociological perspective Financial vows are Socio-economic, participatory, and community-based actions that have the potential to empower vulnerable groups and address poverty, given the current conditions of our society. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study is to describe and interpret the meaning of the vow phenomenon from the perspective of the actors, the reasons for the actors to choose the methods of vow, and finally to discover the barriers to social responsibility and participation of the actors. Using qualitative approach and thematic analysis method and using semi-structured and narrative interviews, data were collected from 18 participants in Mashhad.According to the findings, the participants were divided into conscious and semi-conscious groups in terms of interpreting the meaning of the vow. By comparing the action of the two groups, it is recognized that the type of action of the conscious participants is more rationally focused on the purpose or value and that they feel more responsible and perform their social and participatory roles. The type of action of the subconscious participants is often emotionally focused on the goal or value and chooses individual non-attitudinal methods.

The method of this research is descriptive-analytic and the data of this research have been collected through a library and field study (questionnaire). The statistical population of the study is the rural population of Ardabil city with a population of 74536 people. To calculate the sample size of this society, Cochran formula was used and the family size criterion was used to determine the sample size of the villages and the sample size was estimated to be 358. The face validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by the professors of Mohaghegh Ardebili University and Tabriz University. Also, using Cronbach's alpha, the reliability of questions in the cultural traditions section was 0.79 and in the sustainable livelihoods section of 0.78, which can be said that the questions presented have an acceptable reliability coefficient. The data were analyzed using Spss 21 software. Pearson correlation test and regression were used. Results showed that there is a positive and significant correlation with coefficient of 0.63 between cultural traits variable and sustainable livelihoods in rural areas. Also, the beta coefficient showed that 0.63 percent of cultural trends predict the changes in the sustainable livelihoods of villagers.