Does Public Participation Play a Role to Improve Social and Economic Indices in Fisheries Cooperative Member Societies? A Case Study on Beach Seine Co-Operative Members

The labor international organization believes that the co-operatives have special role in improvement on social-economic condition of poor people. The co-operative of beneficiaries of Caspian Sea beach established in 1993 is one of the oldest co-operatives in Iran. The present study has been done during 2005- 2010 and its purpose is the consideration of participation role in improvement on socio-economic condition of Guilan beach seine co-operative members. The type of this study is causal and expose factor. Its statistical populations are 6000 members from 58 co-operatives. The sample sizes of this study were calculated 510 members by method of cohering sampling and they were selected from 25 co-operatives by method of stratified and simple random sampling. Questionnaire is the main tool of this research. SPSS software was used for analyzing of the data. The obtained results show that statistically, participation has a positive and meaningful relation with literacy, participation in educational-extensional classes, satisfaction from manner of the cooperative management, awareness of principles and elements of co-operative and its economic operation. Also it has a negative relation with the age background of beach seine co-operative members (P>0/05). In relation with the effect of participation on social-economic condition of beach seine members, it was found that participation has the most effect on decrease of labor cost, anxiety and danger.

Public participation Beach seine Social and economic indices