Residents' Access Level to Municipal Services and their Sense of Social Justice (case of study: city of Kerman, Iran)
Subject Areas : Urban Sociological Studies
Keywords: social justice, education, Distributive Justice, Procedural Justice, Municipal Services,
Abstract :
Municipal services planning cannot be successful unless it takes into account the issues of social justice based on all residents' having access to city services. In fact, injustice is a type of inequality which is not generally beneficial. The research draws on Western et al.’s viewpoint that, social justice, conceptually and in terms of empirical research, concentrates on “procedural" and "distributive" Justice. This descriptive-explanatory research is performed using the survey method. It aims to study the association between residents' access to municipal services and their sense of social justice. The research population included all Kermani residents 18-year-old and above, of which 384 members were selected using Cochran's formula and a multi-level cluster sampling method. This research collected the data using a questionnaire. The results indicated that there was a significant negative association between education and sense of social justice. In fact, the more educated the people, the less their sense social justice (r = 0.13, sig = 0.02). There was also a significant relationship between social and distributive justice indices, and no significant relationship existed between social and procedural justice. Gender and age also had no significant relationship with various dimensions of social justice. A significant relationship of 0.001 existed between social justice and degree of accessibility to urban services. Overall, the regression analysis results indicated that the access level to municipal services explains 35% of the variation of sense of social justice.