Examination of City Perceptions and Attitudes of University Students: The Case of Afyonkarahisar

Abstract

During the last twenty years, Turkey has considerably proceeded in higher education and established at least one university in each province. By the increase in the number of universities, university preferences of students have started to gain importance and triggered competition among the universities. Particularly since the 1990s, it has been come up the studentization of Anatolian cities and the transformation of cities into university cities. Many studies on this issue point to this phenomenon. In this process, the city has emerged as an important factor in students' university preferences. In general regard, universities and cities are important interaction network. They also have a function such as contributing to the city's cultural capital, intellectual development, economic development, technological development and many other areas as well as their main purpose of research, education and training. On the other hand, universities are also affected by the structure that creates the dynamics of the city. In this context, it is well-known and revealed that the city where the university is located and the perception of that city have significant functions in preferences of students. Therefore, the student's perception of the city also affects their university choice and perception. The main purpose of this study focusing on the perceptions of Afyonkarahisar of Afyon Kocatepe University students is to reveal the current conditions by measuring the perception while determining the importance of the effective factors in their perceptions of Afyonkarahisar and offering advice and suggestions in order to take the necessary steps to make their perceptions more positive. The study has been carried out by using the questionnaire technique of quantitative research methods. The quantitative research methods have been preferred because the research intents to make a general assessment of the students' perception of the city. It is thought that quantitative research is accepted as the most appropriate method to reach generalizations and test hypotheses. The prepared questions have been sent to the students over the internet. In the scope of the research a questionnaire form has been prepared by examining the scales for city perception used in studies conducted in different cities of our country and the world, and taking into account the socio-cultural, physical and geographical characteristics of Afyonkarahisar. The prepared questionnaire also includes a 5 -point Likert scale (1 I strongly disagree, ... 5 I totally agree), which measures students' perceptions of Afyonkarahisar as well as their demographic characteristics. While the universe of the work is all students who have studied at Afyon Kocatepe University in the previous years, who are currently studying and who will study in the coming years; the sample of the work is all of the students who participated in the survey on a voluntary basis among the students studying in the spring semester of the 2019-2020 academic year. In the analysis of the data, CHAID (Chi -Squared Automatic Interation Detection) analysis that gives a visual result in the form of a tree graph has been used to determine the factors that affect the students' perception of the city as well as descriptive statistics. The obtained data has been collected through an electronic questionnaire with the participation of totally 16209 students and analyzed through the SPSS program. In the study, first of all, is introduced theoretical background on the subject and then the findings examined and at last the data obtained has been interpreted in the conclusion part. At the end of the research, it has been concluded that Afyonkarahisar city has broadly been perceived some gastronomic features such as cream, sujuk, Turkish delight but it has a negative image in economy, infrastructure, security. Also, these consequences are shared by the research of Ö zdemir and Karaca in the previous years. When considered other studies in the literature, this finding actually stands out as a common consequence in medium-sized cities like Afyonkarahisar.