Fertility trends in Iran over recent decades can be plausibly related to a number of causal factors. Population policy shifts were quite marked, and were related to political upheaval and war, which influenced both official policy and popular perceptions of the nation's need for children. A range of developmental factors were also important. The key fertility trends to be explained include the rise to an exceptionally high level in the early 1980s (a TFR of just below 7), and the speed of the subsequent decline to a TFR of about 2.7 in 1996. As well as estimating the proximate determinants of these trends, the paper sets them in their political and developmental context. Iran's fertility trends are then compared with those of Islamic countries of North Africa and West Asia to gain additional insights into possible causal factors. An adequate explanation of fertility change in Iran needs to draw on elements of a number of theories of fertility transition.The key periods of fertility change in Iran over the past three decades have been the onset of a modest decline, mainly in urban areas, in the early 1970s, a resurgence in fertility rates from 1977 to 1984, and the renewed onset of fertility decline since 1988 (Aghajanian and Mehryar 1999; Abbasi-Shavazi 2000b). These changes coincide rather neatly with three political periods: the later stages of the Shah's regime; the Islamic Revolution and the war against Iraq; and a subsequent period of renewed modernization and pragmatism. There appears, then, to be a relationship between the dramatic political events and fertility trends. The obvious linkage is the shifts in population policy that took place over the period: antinatalism and a governmentsponsored family planning program in the later stages of the Shah's regime; denunciation of family planning and encouragement of early marriage in the post-Revolutionary period; and a pragmatic return to antinatalism in the post-1988 period.Fertility has declined dramatically since the adoption of a new population policy in 1988. This rapid decline was greeted with incredulity for some time by many overseas observers. The reason was that much of the world was unaware that in the period following the Islamic Revolution, social change consisted not only of a

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This investigation of the factor structure of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was designed to assess Gotlib's (1984) claim that the BDI is more a measure of general psychopathology than a specific measure of depression when administered to student samples. The data were collected from Iranian students and provide further information about the performance of the BDI in a non‐Western culture. Principal components analysis of the responses to items 1‐20 of the BDI (N= 405) revealed five factors with different degrees of similarity to findings of Hill, Kemp‐Wheeler, and Jones (1986). Within subsamples, the factor scores were predicted in multiple regression analysis from Eysenck Personality Inventory subscales (N, P, E, L), James' I‐E scale, and two measures of self‐esteem. Results indicated that the five factors had distinctly different relationships to the other personality scales. The most general factor seemed to be a measure of helplessness and self‐devaluation. These results confirm the usefulness of the BDI as a measure of depression in college student populations, even in non‐Western cultures.

The psychometric properties of the short form of the Beck Depression Inventory were studied in two Iranian groups. The inventory was translated into Persian and 12 Iranian bilingual judges confirmed the soundness of the translation. The sample comprised two groups of Iranian college students, and data were analyzed separately for each group. Group I consisted of 232 Iranian students (156 men, 76 women) who were studying in American universities, and Group II comprised 305 Iranian students (168 men, 137 women) studying in Iranian universities. In addition to the depression inventory, measures of anxiety, neuroticism, psychoticism, loneliness, misanthropy, locus of control, self-esteem, and extroversion were obtained. The item-total score correlations were mostly in the upper fifties and sixties. The coefficient alpha estimates of reliability were .85 and .83 in Groups I and II, respectively. Descriptive statistics and test-retest reliability were reported. Significantly positive correlations between the scores of the depression inventory and measures of anxiety, neuroticism, psychoticism, loneliness, misanthropy and externality of locus of control were found. Negative correlations also were obtained between scores on the depression inventory and self-esteem, and extroversion. Comparisons of the two samples of male and female subjects supported the construct validity of the inventory. The results provided evidence which supported the validity and reliability of the depression inventory in Iranian college students.