Social Factors Influencing Tendency towards the Superstitions (Case Study: Students of Azad University of Ardabil)

Superstition is an unreasonable and non-scientific belief that roots in the world of imagination, mixed with culture and accepted by the community members as a natural phenomenon. Superstition not only blocks the development process but also has numerous negative effects. The main objective of the research is to study the social factors influencing superstition among students of Islamic Azad University of Ardabil. They were 10,592 students from whom 371 students were selected as a sample through stratified random sampling method and Cochran Formula. In the research-made questionnaire of this study, the reliability of superstition tendency was high (0.80 < ). This study is done using the SPSS statistical software analysis and the results show that the average tendency towards superstition among women was significantly more than men. There was a significant inverse relationship between modernity and tendency towards superstition. The average tendency towards superstition among the employees was significantly more than non-working people. When people get older, their tendency towards superstition decreases. The average tendency towards superstition was different based on the education level. The stepwise regression analysis show that three variables of gender, modernity and the age could explain about 16 percent of the tendency to superstition.