analysis of economic factors affecting women's cooperatives performance in iran

given the importance of cooperatives in women's empowerment and the necessity of improving their performance, the present study was conducted to investigate factors or constructs discriminating successful and non-successful women's cooperatives to recognize the enabling conditions for cooperative's success. this was a co relational-survey type research in which 12819 of the members of directing boards as well as 1500 experts of the ministry of cooperation consisted its statistical population, respectively. out of these, 453 members of directing boards and 153 experts of the ministry of cooperation were selected as sample through a multi-stage sampling technique. two questionnaires were developed for collecting the data. the validity of the questionnaires was approved through panel of expert's judgment. the reliabilities of the main scales of the questionnaires were 0.97 and 0.84 for the two populations under study, respectively as formerly introduced. cluster and discriminate analyses in spss-win were applied to analyze the data. in addition, a campsite index was developed to assess the performance of women's cooperatives in different provinces by hierarchical cluster analysis technique. then, the provinces were classified based on this index. according to discriminating analysis, the power of repaying loans, revolving capital, current property, cooperative's income and the level of credotorship were the main variables affecting cooperative success. other variables entered into the equation showed that financial management of cooperatives is the most important factor affecting on their successes.