Social Sciences

Abstract Introduction
The present study offers a qualitative and sociological analysis of high school male student dropout in Baneh County. Contrary to initial perspectives that reduced dropout to an individual failure, moral deviance, or purely academic shortfall, it is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon emerging at the intersection of economic, cultural, and social structures. In border regions like Baneh, this phenomenon assumes a distinct articulation as the centralized logic of formal education encounters the specific ecology of a "border economy". The rise of border bazaars and the rapid circulation of commercial capital in Baneh have established a new framework for social status, creating a deep conflict between the "cash values of the market" and the "deferred, abstract promises of the school". Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to understand the semantic construction of school dropout and describe the structural conditions giving rise to it in the border context of Baneh. The conceptual framework integrates theories of spatial production and capital accumulation (David Harvey), structural reproduction and cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu), linguistic codes (Basil Bernstein), strain theory (Robert K. Merton), symbolic interactionism, and the concept of "powerful knowledge" (Michael Young) to explain the confrontation between two conflicting structural logics: the hegemony of the market versus the formal education system.
Methodology
This research adopted a qualitative approach with phenomenological and structuralist orientations, utilizing inductive thematic analysis based on Braun and Clarke’s six-phase framework. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. To prevent recall bias and capture the full complexity of the field, criterion-based purposive sampling was conducted across three distinct layers until theoretical saturation was reached: First Layer (Core Sample): 15 male dropouts currently working in the market (aged 15–25, who dropped out within the past five years); Second Layer (Class Contexts): 15 parents of male dropouts working in the market (aged 38–60); Third Layer (Educational Structure): 10 teachers, counselors, and principals from Baneh high schools (with at least 5 years of experience). During data analysis, 235 descriptive open codes were initially extracted, which were systematically categorized through continuous comparison into 29 sub-themes, ultimately synthesizing a dense network of 10 main themes. Data validity and trustworthiness were ensured through triangulation, member checking, and critical reflexivity.
Findings
Qualitative data analysis led to the identification of 10 main themes, structured across two levels: structural and perceptual/life-world: At the first level, structural and institutional contexts—through the "hegemony of the bazaar-city and the supremacy of border businesses," alongside the commodification of urban space—have shifted the criterion of success from educational attainment to immediate cash income. Simultaneously, the "inefficiency and rigidity of the educational system, "stemming from the misalignment of abstract curricula with ecological needs, has led to the occupational alienation of students. Furthermore, the "commodification of degrees and the obstruction of meritocracy"—marked by the depreciation of university degrees in the labor market and a lack of meritocracy in public sector employment—combined with the "erosion of teachers' status and the shift in reference groups," has undermined the social standing of educators, replacing them with merchants and traders as new role models, thereby reproducing the "peddler-border-carrier (Koulbar) subject". At the second level, the semantic life-world of students is shaped under "premature dreams and a thirst for financial independence" aimed at achieving early male maturity. Coupled with a "perception of academic temporal dislocation and the contrast between immediate and deferred rationality," students perceive the slow pace of schooling as lagging behind the immediate returns of the market. This dynamic is further deepened by the "preference for speculative values over knowledge values" and the dominance of instrumental rationality, leading to the departure from school being redefined as a "positive action and autonomous agency"—a rational and deliberate decision. Nonetheless, this process is accompanied by the "psychological reconstruction and experience of class rejection and humiliation" arising from constant material comparisons and the onset of school phobia, ultimately culminating in the "reduction of the degree to a purchasable commodity meant only to clear administrative hurdles" and the complete erosion of the intrinsic value of learning.
Discussion and Conclusion
The findings demonstrate that male high school dropout in Baneh cannot be reduced to absolute poverty, low intellect, or individual deficiencies. Rather, leaving the formal education system is the outcome of a fundamental conflict between the logic of the border ecosystem and the centralized national education system. In Baneh, the dominance of the border economy, rapid capital velocity, and the visible material success of the nouveau riche have severely eroded the symbolic prestige of educational institutions and teaching staff. Observing unemployment and material poverty among educated individuals, alongside a perceived lack of transparency in public sector recruitment, students experience a form of "academic temporal dislocation"—viewing time spent in school as a waste that causes them to lag behind the fast-paced market. Under these conditions, dropping out becomes an "agentic and rational process". Actors reinterpret leaving school as a shortcut to financial independence, peer status, freedom from class humiliation, and entry into adulthood and manhood. Ultimately, academic degrees degrade from intrinsically valuable intellectual achievements into mere purchasable administrative commodities. Addressing this crisis requires a fundamental revision of centralized curricula, educational decentralization, the implementation of vocational training tailored to the border ecosystem, and the restoration of both the economic and symbolic status of schools.

Abstract 1. Introduction
Historically, the university in Iran has served as the primary institution for the production, organization, and legitimization of knowledge, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. It has played a central role in defining intellectual norms, training elites, and constructing truth. However, over the last decade, the Iranian university has faced a significant decline in epistemic authority, institutional closure, bureaucratic rigidity, and an inability to address the intellectual demands of the new generation. Parallel to this institutional erosion, the expansion of digital infrastructure and social media platforms (Instagram, Telegram, YouTube), in conjunction with the emergence and growth of “Independent Social Science Schools” (such as Shams Academy, Bidar School, Tehran School, and Halqe-ye Yek-Chand), has shattered the university’s historical monopoly. Accordingly, the central problem of this research is to investigate the pluralization of social science education outside the formal academic circuit and to answer how these alternative learning ecosystems, emerging in the light of the attention economy and new media, influence the institutional position and imperial authority of the Iranian university.
2. Literature Review
In global higher education literature, the critique of the university often centers on neoliberal logic, the commercialization of science, and the commodification of knowledge (e.g., Bill Readings’ “The University in Ruins” and David Nugent’s “Knowledge and Empire”). However, empirical studies in Iran (Kazemi, 2018; Sedighian Bidgoli, 2018; Ghaneirad, 2011) demonstrate that the predicament of the Iranian university is not its organic connection to the market or the commodification of knowledge, but rather institutional isolation, bureaucratic ossification, exclusionary licensing systems, and the structural marginalization of independent intellectual currents. To explain this phenomenon, this research employs a multi-faceted post-structuralist framework: Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of “apparatus” (dispositif) and “power/knowledge” to analyze disciplinary mechanisms and subjectification; Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight” and “desire-machines” to explain the dynamic exodus of audiences from formal circuits; Stuart Hall’s “cultural articulation” to integrate theoretical content with media forms; and Henri Bergson’s juxtaposition of “mechanical time” versus “fluid and expansive temporality” to explain accelerated digital existence.
3. Methodology
This research is grounded in an interpretive-qualitative paradigm with a post-structuralist approach. Data were gathered from two complementary sources: first, statistical data from the “National Survey on Social Media Culture in Iran” (2023, Iranian Research Institute for Culture, Art and Communication) to map the context of user behavior; and second, four in-depth semi-structured interviews (60–90 minutes each) with the founders and managers of five prominent independent social science institutions (Shams Academy, Bidar School, Tehran School, and Halqe-ye Yek-Chand), selected via purposive sampling based on four criteria: active media presence, educational continuity, production of alternative content, and distinctive aesthetics. Data analysis followed “thematic analysis” (Braun & Clarke, 2006) alongside “rhizomatic writing/thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), while the structure of conceptual relationships was examined using “conceptual network analysis” (via the igraph package in R) to measure degree centrality and betweenness centrality.
4. Results
The research findings indicate a fundamental transformation in the technological and epistemic foundations of informal education:
· Platform Shift: Education has shifted from the print-based logic and poster-advertising of the 2000s (institutions such as Porsesh and Roodad-e Tazeh) to the algorithmic circuits of social media (particularly Instagram) since the 2010s.
· Post-Digital Subjectification: Based on national data, 86% of Iranian users are active daily on social media, and 63% receive their news from these platforms. Within this space, an “open body” and a “hesitant yet active subject” have been constructed—a subject in a post-truth condition who seeks verification not from formal authorities, but through dialogue with peers (32%) or cross-platform validation (35%).
· Attention Economy and Visibility Politics: The survival and activism of these institutions oscillate between the strategy of “adaptation to algorithmic formal logic” and “aesthetic resistance.”
· Emergence of New Theoretical Figures: The epicenter of theoretical disputes has migrated from university courtyards and debates among traditional professors (such as Abazari and Kachouian) to the ecosystem of Reels and Stories created by platform-based thinkers (such as Ardabili and Saleh Najafi).
· Conceptual Network Analysis: “University” retains the highest centrality (Degree 22, Betweenness 0.3272) as the pole of comparison; “Subject” (0.3042) is the primary mediator; and “Independent Schools,” despite a high degree (16), have low betweenness (0.0564), indicating their functional independence and archipelago-like structure.
5. Discussion
Independent schools do not act as mere “complements” to the university, nor do they seek to fully “replace” it; rather, they function as the university’s “structural other.” The post-Revolutionary discursive closure of the university, the hegemony of exclusionary bureaucracy, and the expulsion of critical thinkers created lines of flight that ejected the desire for learning outside. In this space, a post-disciplinary subjectivity has formed, which, unlike the rigid discipline of the university classroom, is based on connectivity, fluidity, and network-centricity. Through cultural articulation, independent schools have successfully linked critical theory to concrete issues, lifestyles, and the aesthetic tastes of their audiences, replacing the rigid academic calendar with expansive, instantaneous digital temporality—thereby constructing a new regime of validity and epistemic legitimacy outside the monopoly of academic degrees.
6. Conclusion
What is occurring in the field of social science education in Iran is an epistemic rupture and a reconfiguration of power and knowledge relations. The “University Empire” has encountered deep structural cracks and has lost its sole monopoly on legitimizing the understanding of society and the human condition. However, the horizon is not the erasure of the university nor absolute submission to platform logic, but rather the establishment of a permanent field of tension between the orthodox academic order and diverse, networked forces. In this context, independent schools have solidified their leadership in emerging theoretical fields and digital culture, while the “Iranian networked subject” has become the final and decisive agent of this post-authoritarian architecture.

Abstract Introduction
The social unrest of 2022 (1401) transformed Iranian universities into important sites of collective action and social conflict. It coincided with universities’ reopening after COVID-19 and developments following Mahsa Amini’s death and the emergence of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. University spaces became sites for expressing dissatisfaction, confronting institutional order, and diverse forms of action. Although previous studies have examined student movements and the 2022 unrest, less attention has been paid to lived experiences and how unrest became embedded in everyday university life and institutional relations. The study examines the dimensions of unrest in university space and how students experienced and interpreted it.
Research Question
The main research question is: How did the social unrest of 2022 emerge, become experienced, and become organized through interaction with institutional structures in university space? It examines conditions of emergence, students’ actions and interactions with university structures, and consequences for university life.
Literature Review
Research on student action has largely emphasized organization, collective demands, mobilization, and collective action; other studies interpret university actions as extensions of broader social developments. These approaches provide less insight into everyday conflict, diverse forms of action, and interaction between student agency and institutional regulation. This study therefore approaches unrest through lived experiences, as a process intertwined with everyday life and institutional relations.
Methodology
This qualitative study employed Strauss and Corbin’s systematic grounded theory, using 29 semi-structured interviews with students from different fields and open, axial, and selective coding. Concepts and categories were developed from interview data to construct a model explaining the emergence, experience, and consequences of unrest. Allameh Tabataba’i University was selected for the continuity and intensity of events and the possibility of examining experiences through winter 2022–2023.
Results
Findings were organized into thirteen interconnected categories: erosion of the normative institutional order, activation of moral-emotional sensitivities, accumulation of conflictual experiences, disruption in social continuity, institutional affordances for student action, generational value-normative changes, transformations in mental horizons, plurality and structural divisions within the student body, institutional control-regulatory dynamics, representations and circulation of meanings in media and virtual spaces, internal student dynamics, perceptual-emotional erosion of agency, and external interventions and shocks.
The core concept is “biocontention,” referring to a situation in which conflict over ways of living, everyday interactions, bodily experience, and expression takes shape within everyday university life. Four interrelated axes constitute this experience: “saying what had previously remained unsaid,” “making the divide visible,” “testing the possibility of being,” and “redefining the university.” These are interconnected dimensions rather than successive stages.
Students used diverse strategies, including gatherings, sit-ins, slogans, statements, symbolic appropriation of space, performances, collective absence from classes, everyday resistance, risk management, horizontal organization, dialogue and bargaining with university officials, and legal and institutional responses. These strategies involved maintaining presence, managing risks, and preserving or redefining action within the university. Consequences appeared at lived-mental, relational-collective, and institutional-university levels.
Discussion
The findings indicate that the 2022 university unrest cannot be fully captured as an organized, goal-oriented movement based on clearly defined demands. Boundaries between overt action and everyday resistance, individual and collective action, and everyday and political life were continuously blurred. Biocontention connects forms of action, lived experiences, and institutional relations within a common field of conflict. This perspective also highlights how students’ actions were shaped by changing institutional responses, shifting relations, and tensions between individual experience, collective participation, and university regulation throughout the period examined. The university became an arena where conflict was experienced and negotiated through encounters with institutional order. It was redefined as a space where relations among students, institutional rules, power, bodily experience, and ways of living were renegotiated in everyday interactions.
Conclusion
By developing biocontention, this study offers a framework for understanding 2022 unrest through everyday life, student action, and institutional relations. Unrest emerged through broader social conditions, accumulated experiences, institutional possibilities for action, changing mental horizons, media representations, and institutional regulation. Its consequences reshaped students’ university experiences, collective relations, future horizons, and relationship with institutional order. This framework enables examination beyond organizational or event-centered approaches, placing lived experiences and transformations in university relations at the center of analysis.

Abstract Introduction In the official vocabulary of waste management, a disposal site is rendered as an engineering problem: siting, contracts, leachate, and odor control. This idiom leaves little room for the meanings and political struggles a dump accumulates for its neighbors. This study follows one such site's entire contested life: the municipal dump at Anjilsi, in Babol County, Mazandaran, Iran, operating from emergency founding in 1998 to contested closure in 2024, after a judicial order and residents blocking the trucks themselves. Anjilsi arose because an earlier dump at Mati Kola, near Babol, had been closed by protest, and the search for a successor skipped any feasibility study; what was meant as temporary lasted three decades. Full ethnographies of a dump's entire arc remain scarce in posthumanist waste scholarship, especially beyond the global North. The organizing question, why did this project fail, or more pointedly, who killed this site, is one its own framework must first unsettle. Theoretical Framework The analysis draws on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, read through a posthumanist sensibility. ANT treats "the social" not as a pre-existing structure but as the provisional outcome of associations among humans, objects, institutions, and texts; agency is not an inherent property but an effect of position in a chain of mediations. Translation and black box redirect inquiry from who acted to what actor enabled and redirected action. Non-humans qualify as actors whenever their presence or removal changes events, giving leachate, rainfall, birds, and jackals the same explanatory weight as officials and judges. In this framework, the opening question of who killed Anjilsi dissolves: since action is distributed across a network, the better question is which network produced, and later undid, three decades of stabilization. Methodology The research combines field ethnography with science and technology studies, treating Anjilsi and surrounding villages not as a bounded area but, following ANT's flattening of the field, as one including documents, administrative trails, and institutional actors. Fieldwork ran from April to September 2025, with indirect follow-up into early 2026, beginning through a local contact and expanding by snowball sampling. Data came from participant observation, unstructured interviews, and documents; interviewees included residents, provincial and municipal waste-management staff, legal, technical, and environmental officials, two university faculty members, and a former municipal employee, with the judiciary reconstructed through others' accounts. Residents are referred to here collectively; identities are withheld given the material's sensitivity. Following ANT's principle of symmetry, non-humans, leachate, odor, rainfall, birds, dogs, jackals, and trees were analyzed as actors, since each altered residents' decisions and possibilities for action. Results and Discussion The findings trace one highly unstable network through five intersecting dynamics. First, an improvised temporary fix hardened over decades into an almost irreplaceable fixture through institutional-economic lock-in: no alternative site, weak inter-agency coordination, and compensatory goods, roads, electricity, water, jobs, bound residents to the site's survival, turning contingency into what all treated as a natural institution. Second, technical remediation arrived only after contamination had stabilized: treatment of roughly forty cubic meters a day fell far short of output near one hundred twenty-five, with only a fraction separated, so university and contractor interventions were belated repair, not prevention, exposing officials' limited evaluative capacity. Third, this incapacity had consequences no fence could contain: leachate reached rice paddies, orchards, and household wells; odor entered domestic life; birds, dogs, and jackals redistributed waste far beyond the site, and residents described cancer, chronic illness, and fear for their children, pollution becoming a bodily fact. Fourth, these injuries attached to the region's name: villages once known for orchards and forest came to be known for the dump; land devalued, youth left, and while a neighboring village gained town status, Anjilsi's downstream neighbors stagnated, foreclosing a future the site might have held. Fifth, resident opposition evolved from a 2003 road blockade suppressed by security forces, through years of petitioning, to early-2010 lawsuits that secured a court order, which residents enforced by occupying the entrance once implementation stalled. Read together, these dynamics form a single contest over whose account of the dump would prevail: municipal and security actors enlisted roads, jobs, and delay to override residents, until leachate, birds, jackals, and finally the judiciary, mobilized by residents, undid that arrangement, so neither endurance nor closure traces to any single human or non-human author. Conclusion The paper argues that waste has no fixed essence and that a dump site is a social fact exceeding any nature/culture divide, so no engineering fix confined to its physical perimeter could resolve what it became. Narrated as a three-decade chronicle, the case also makes a historiographical point: granting leachate, birds, and jackals narrative weight alongside officials and judges yields a history that rejects the hierarchical logic of dominant over subordinate, center over margin, a logic still organizing much writing on Iran's social past, including critical genealogies of marginalized places such as Tehran's Kahrizak district. Waste governance thus emerges here as an ongoing, contested process of meaning-making among heterogeneous actors rather than a problem any single purely technical fix could close.

Abstract 1. Introduction The expansion of digital technologies, increasing availability of behavioral and communication data, and development of computational methods have created new opportunities for studying social phenomena. Computational Social Science (CSS), an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of social sciences, computer science, and data science, represents an important manifestation of these developments. Its growth has been accompanied by the increasing application of agent-based modeling, social network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. Nevertheless, the historical association between technological developments and the expansion of CSS does not, by itself, demonstrate how technologies influence research topic selection or the mechanisms of knowledge production. Understanding research patterns in this field requires examining different dimensions of scientific organization, including collaboration among researchers, the conceptual and methodological organization of publications, and citation relationships. Accordingly, this study evaluates these three dimensions while paying particular attention to the position of digital technologies and computational methods within the conceptual structure of CSS. The central research question is: What patterns of scientific collaboration, conceptual and methodological organization, and citation relationships have emerged in computational social science in the context of technological transformations? 2. Literature Review and Theoretical Framework Previous research on CSS can be broadly classified into three categories: studies examining its historical emergence and development, investigations of the methodological and epistemological opportunities and limitations associated with computational technologies, and bibliometric studies exploring its scientific structure and evolution. Although these studies emphasize the interdisciplinary character of CSS and the significance of digital data and computational methods, examining collaboration, conceptual relationships, and citation structures together can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the field. The theoretical framework draws on the sociology of science, particularly Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. From this perspective, science is understood as a system constituted and reproduced through scientific communications. Publications, citations, and other forms of scholarly communication provide observable manifestations of this system. Bibliometric relationships therefore offer empirical evidence about the organization of scientific communication, although they cannot independently establish researchers' motivations or causal mechanisms of knowledge production. 3. Methodology This study adopts a quantitative bibliometric and network-analytical approach. The dataset comprises 926 peer-reviewed English-language journal articles indexed in Scopus between 1999 and 2025. Articles were selected when the expression "computational social science" explicitly appeared in their titles, abstracts, or author keywords. This selection strategy was designed to avoid artificially increasing the representation of technological terminology by incorporating technology-related keywords into the initial search criteria. Consequently, the dataset represents explicitly self-identified CSS publications rather than the entire substantive literature potentially associated with the field. Data were analyzed using VOSviewer and Gephi through four complementary techniques. First, co-authorship analysis examined scientific collaboration, research communities, and central actors. Second, keyword co-occurrence analysis identified conceptual relationships, prominent research terminology, and thematic clusters. Third, co-citation analysis examined journals and sources jointly referenced by publications in the dataset. Fourth, bibliographic coupling was applied to citing publications, with results examined at the journal level. Network measures, including degree, betweenness centrality, density, modularity, and connected components, were used to characterize structural patterns. Technological transformations were treated as the historical context of the study rather than as an independently measured causal determinant. 4. Results The co-authorship network contained 2,481 authors and 5,845 collaboration links. Its density was approximately 0.0019, with 551 connected components and modularity approaching 0.97. The largest connected component included only approximately 13.2% of all authors. These findings indicate a relatively fragmented collaboration structure composed of multiple research communities rather than a single densely interconnected network. Central researchers came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including computer science, physics, sociology, political science, and communication studies. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified prominent positions for terms such as social media, big data, machine learning, natural language processing, and Twitter. These terms primarily refer to digital data sources, technological environments, and computational analytical methods. Descriptive comparisons across research periods also revealed changes in the relative prominence of methodological terminology, from modeling and simulation toward platform-generated data, machine learning, and, more recently, artificial intelligence and large language models. These patterns indicate the accumulation and diversification of research approaches rather than the complete replacement of earlier methods. Citation analyses revealed connections with multiple disciplinary traditions. Established social science journals appeared among the frequently cited sources, while interdisciplinary, data-oriented, and technology-related journals occupied prominent positions among publications citing the CSS literature. However, differences between these networks cannot establish a historical transition from sociological traditions toward technological disciplines because their datasets and relational definitions differ. 5. Discussion The findings demonstrate that different dimensions of scientific organization exhibit distinct structural patterns. Fragmentation in direct co-authorship relationships does not necessarily imply conceptual fragmentation, since researchers may share methods, data sources, and intellectual references without collaborating directly. Similarly, the centrality of technological terminology indicates the prominent position of digital infrastructures and computational approaches within the conceptual organization of CSS, but does not establish their direct influence on researchers' decisions. From a social systems perspective, these findings can be interpreted as different manifestations of observable scientific communication. Nevertheless, the analysis does not directly test the self-reproduction mechanisms of the scientific system or demonstrate technological causation. 6. Conclusion Computational social science exhibits a relatively fragmented and multicentered collaboration structure, a conceptual organization characterized by prominent technological and methodological terminology, and citation relationships connecting diverse scientific disciplines. These findings provide a multidimensional account of research organization and demonstrate the importance of distinguishing collaboration networks, conceptual associations, and citation structures. The study is limited by its focus on English-language publications explicitly identifying themselves with CSS and by the descriptive nature of bibliometric evidence. Future research should incorporate direct analyses of publication content and researchers' methodological decisions to investigate how technological opportunities shape research questions and knowledge-production practices.

Abstract Introduction
Early marriage is a complex familial phenomenon with structural and cultural intricacies that significantly impacts developing societies. This phenomenon imposes substantial costs on families and healthcare systems due to various physical and emotional repercussions. In Iran, while the legal age for marriage is 13 for girls and 15 for boys—subject to parental consent and judicial discretion for those under these ages—global trends indicate that girls are disproportionately affected. Given that minors often lack the requisite information for informed decision-making, early marriage frequently borders on forced marriage. Although the rate in Iran is lower than in many developing nations, official statistics confirm the prevalence of underage marriage. In Kuhdasht County, particularly within the Zirtang-siab rural district, despite limited official data, field observations and lived experiences reveal that this phenomenon significantly impedes the educational trajectories and personal development of young women. As no sociological research has previously addressed the underlying patterns of early marriage in this specific locale, this study aims to explore these patterns through the lived experiences of women, seeking to understand the contextual factors and the meanings attributed to early marriage from their perspectives.
Literature Review
Existing studies on early marriage in Iran and globally encompass a broad spectrum of approaches, including investigations into its consequences, the lived experiences of women, expert and social worker perspectives, and legal analyses, as well as quantitative assessments. Much of the existing literature has focused on urban or peri-urban (county and provincial) settings. However, given the profound structural, socio-cultural, and economic disparities between urban and rural contexts—and considering the multifaceted repercussions of this phenomenon on individual, familial, and social dimensions—there is a compelling need to examine this issue within purely rural settings. Consequently, to achieve a deeper understanding, the present study investigates the underlying patterns of early marriage from the perspectives of women with firsthand experience in the Zirtang-siab rural district of Kuhdasht County. To this end, while reviewing relevant theories and concepts, the research integrates individual perceptions with their specific social contexts, utilizing methodological tools designed to enhance the researcher’s proximity to the empirical reality.
Methodology
The present study employed a qualitative approach utilizing thematic analysis to gain an in-depth understanding of the meanings and complexities inherent in the participants’ perspectives within their social context. Using purposive and snowball sampling, 16 in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with eligible women in the Zirtang-siab rural district. The analysis was iterative and concurrent with data collection; the researcher engaged in a process of constant comparison, moving back and forth between the dataset, emerging concepts, themes, and interpretations. Initial coding yielded 179 codes, which were reduced to 92 concepts after eliminating duplicates. These concepts were subsequently grouped into 13 sub-themes and ultimately synthesized into 3 overarching main themes.
To ensure the trustworthiness of this study, peer debriefing was employed, involving the systematic auditing of codes, concepts, and categories by research colleagues and team members. Furthermore, member checking was conducted to validate the accuracy and authenticity of the identified concepts and categories by consulting the research participants themselves.
Results
Early marriage in the studied context is the product of a complex interplay between structural and individual factors, which have been organized into three overarching themes.
First, “The Persistence of Traditional Socio-Cultural Patterns” manifests through concepts such as fatalism, patriarchy, the preservation of family honor, and concerns regarding perceived chastity. Particularly through the emphasis on consanguineous and endogamous marriages to maintain kinship cohesion and traditional support systems, marriage decision-making emerges not as an individual choice, but as a collective familial and social imperative.
Second, “Economic and Non-Economic Poverty and Deprivation” acts as a primary catalyst. In this dimension, familial financial constraints and infrastructural deficiencies in remote areas—coupled with geographical isolation and limited access to education and counseling services—drive young girls toward domesticity and early marriage.
Finally, the theme of “Individual Immaturity and Unfinished Childhood” underscores that participants are in a developmental stage characterized by a lack of autonomy and informed decision-making capacity. In this state, marriage often occurs under the influence of unilateral parental decisions or transient impulses to escape the constraints of the paternal home, frequently bypassing the necessary psychological and social maturity.
Conclusion
The findings indicate that early marriage is a complex phenomenon arising from the interweaving of traditions, cultural structures, and socioeconomic constraints, all of which make informed decision-making about marriage difficult. In the tribal and kinship-based context of the study site, early marriage is not merely a choice; it also functions as an adaptive strategy for consolidating kinship ties and preserving family status. It is reproduced under the pressure of collective norms and fatalistic beliefs, while poverty and geographical isolation further contribute to its persistence. Addressing this challenge and preventing its potentially irreversible psychological and physical harms to girls requires raising parents’ awareness of the harms associated with inappropriate traditions, alongside broader changes to cultural and social structures.