Assessment of Factors Affecting Quality of Life in Centers of Rural Districts, Jiroft County

Introduction The concept of quality of life has been emerged in theoretical literature and press in early 1960s, it has turned to be one of the interested issues in social science and in recent years, it has been a base for modern differentiation and classification of countries. Improving quality of life in a special place or for special people or groups is always the focusing concern to plan makers. Improving quality of life could be followed by other dimensions of development such as social, economic and physical ones. In this way, rural areas need some studies related to quality of life. These studies should include related aspects to quality of life in the village, reduction of geographical exclusion and accessibility to basic needs of life. Moreover, the results of studies on quality of life could be helpful in assessment of policies, ranking the locations, codification of management strategies and urban and rural planning which can facilitate understanding and prioritization of socio-economic issues for plan makers and managers to improve people's quality of life. Considering that urban growth and urbanization are the most obvious social, economic changes in recent times, urbanization rapidly spread so that this phenomenon has limited most of the opportunities which can improve quality of life for the villages. However, in many rural areas in Iran, despite of different changes in case of improving quality of life, we are still far from the ideal situation. This condition is more obvious in the areas that most of the population lives in the villages; Jiroft County located in Kerman Province is an example. Therefore, this study aims to assess factors affecting quality of life in villages located in Jiroft. Methodology According to its aim, this study is a practical one and regarding its data collection method, it is a survey which uses questionnaires as the tool of data collection; The face validity is confirmed by faculty members in Yasouj University and Shiraz University; to examine its validity, Pilot study is conducted as the pre-test outside the study population, on the residents in Ali-Abad village, Jiroft; Calculation of Cronbach's alfa for different factors (from 0.71 to 0.89) is estimated that suggests the reliability of this assessment tool. In this study, the unit of analysis includes the householder. Furthermore, according to government census, the population was 4243 households among them 350 households have been chosen using Krejcie & Morgan random sampling table as the population of this study; samples have been chosen according to each village population and geographical region according to the classes. Data analysis was performed using SPSS. Discussion and Conclusion This study is the assessment of each factors of quality of life in studied villages from householders' point of view. According to the obtained average value of 2.75, analytical results in the case of social factor are assessed which is under the average. According to the obtained average value of 3.43, in the case of social security, the studied households' condition has been estimated more than the average and findings related to average comparison in this factor shows that Delfard village has the worst condition and Sarbijan village has the best condition. According to the average value of 0.74 in the case of housing factor, the housing status in the studied villages was estimated more than the average. The results of average comparison showed that Halil village is on the highest level and Esfandegheh village is on the lowest level in the case of average factor. According to the average value of 20.38 which is related to the third group that means most of the studied population, income factor showed that most of studied population have average income and among them, comparing other studied villages, residents of Khaton-abad village have the highest level in the case of average income and it is different from other studied villages. Next factor is wealth which is assessed by five subset. According to the average value of 0.41 in this factor, it can be said that the level of wealth in studied villages is lower than average level and among them, Delfard and Ganj-abad villages are at the lowest level and Esfandegheh and Sarbijan villages are at the highest level. Next factor is per capita household expenditure on clothing; the result of analyzing this factor shows that given the frequency of 192 people (54.9%), per capita expenditure on clothing for each person is between 200 to 300 hundred Tomans in a year and comparing to other villages, Delfard village has a better condition regarding the average level of this factor. The results in the nutrition factor shows that villages located in this region are divided to four grades regarding the average calories intake per gram in food by households. Among them, Delfard village is completely different from other villages and in terms of calories amount that its residents consume, this village has a better condition. The last studied factor is people's satisfaction of objective dimensions of quality of life. According to the obtained average value of 3.15 which is higher than theoretical average (number 3), considering this factor, the status of studied households is assessed higher than the average level. The results of average comparison in this factor show that all the villages are divided to four classes regarding the average value of the considered factor. Among them Dolat-abad and Ganj-abad villages have the worst and Esfandegheh and Delfard villages have the best condition.