Abstract

The study was conducted for sociological examination of the reasons for the tendencies towards crime in cyberspace in youth and adolescents of Zahedan in 2015-2016. The present study was descriptive-survey in which a questionnaire was used to collect the opinions. The population of the youths and adolescents of Zahedan, who were using the Internet, was over 100,000, of whom 484 people were randomly selected using Morgan table. A researcher-developed questionnaire - whose validity was confirmed by the professors and authorities and reliability was obtained as 0.736 using Cronbach's alpha - was used for data collection. The study used descriptive and inferential statistics (T and Friedman tests) for data analysis. The results indicated that the characteristics of the cyberspace, individual characteristics and socio-cultural factors play a significant role in incidence of crime in a cyberspace. Among the factors examined in each hypothesis, the attractiveness of the virtual environment, computer knowledge, economic status, and unemployment, respectively, have significant roles in creating in cybercrime.