Meta-Analysis of Factors Affecting the Development of Rural Entrepreneurship in Iran

Background: The development of rural entrepreneurship is a multidimensional phenomenon, influenced by various fields, factors, and skills.The establishment of rural growth centers, specialized training of entrepreneurs, the use of information and experiences of successful entrepreneurs and access to the media, attention to the specific characteristics of the environmental context, the existence of legal structures, economic conditions, level of knowledge, social and environmental conditions, innovation and pragmatism, access to water, soil texture type and water quality, and institutional factors (such as the property rights system, transparency and accountability), the reward system, etc., are some of the factors and indicators affecting the development of rural entrepreneurship in Iran.With the increase in the number of studies in the field of rural entrepreneurship, which is a necessary condition for the systematic production of knowledge, there is a need for reliable methods to integrate the findings of these studies more than ever.To understand this necessity, therefore, the present study sought to conduct a metaanalysis of the factors affecting the development of rural entrepreneurship in Iran to draw conclusions about the importance of the issue of rural entrepreneurship development and its antecedents by integrating and integrating separate research projects in a coherent manner.Methods: This research was conducted using quantitative meta-analysis, a type of basic-applied research.In this method, statistical methods are used to summarize and provide a quantitative description of the findings of cumulative research.The statistical population in this study included retrospective research with rural entrepreneurship in the period from 2001 to 2024 as the dependent variable.Based on input criteria (statistical, quantitative studies, complete presentation of results and findings, retrospective research with the dependent variable of rural entrepreneurship and its forms) and output criteria (qualitative studies, meta-analytical research, barrier assessments, non-quantitative modeling, library studies, needs assessment, factor analysis and scale validation, ranking research, fuzzy and pure mathematical studies, and situational assessments of rural entrepreneurship), and also document evaluation based on validation criteria (document quality from the perspective of observing the principles of compiling valid research documents in the field of problem analysis, observing theoretical and methodological rules, and using appropriate statistics for description and analysis, as well as presenting results).Finally, 50 research documents were extracted in the form of 294 hypotheses.The extracted statistics were converted to r (correlation coefficient) using the Hunter and Schmidt approach.For the inferential analysis of the data, the publication bias hypothesis was assessed using a funnel plot and the Begg and Mezumdar rank correlation.A moderation analysis was performed to examine the factors that provided the significance of the effect to interpret the evidence and present the results, and to analyze the effect size and interpret the heterogeneity of the studies.Results: The significance of the homogeneity coefficient Q revealed the existence of heterogeneity among the effect sizes of studies on rural entrepreneurship development in Iran, and, therefore, a random model was used to combine the effect sizes.The results of the Bagg and Mezomdar rank correlation analysis regarding the evaluation of publication bias in the reviewed studies indicated the confirmation of the no publication bias assumption.The results of the errorfree N coefficient analysis indicated that 1570 more studies should be conducted in the field of rural entrepreneurship development so that the final results of the research could be changed by possible errors.Based on the results of this study, it was determined that the average combined effect size of the factors affecting rural entrepreneurship development was 0.475, which indicates