Üniversite Öğrencilerinin Sosyal Adalet Kavramına İlişkin Algıları: Bir Metafor Çalışması

Abstract

One of the reasons for this study is that university students believe that there are some injustices in the compulsory distance education process due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Another reason for the study is the belief that the concept of social justice is not sufficiently understood by our society in general and by university students in particular. For this reason, in this study, the general perceptions of university students on social justice were tried to be determined through metaphors. Phenomenological design, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the research. Easily accessible case sampling was used to determine the study group. The participants of the study are 371 university students studying at the graduate and undergraduate level at Bingöl University in the 2020-2021 academic year. In the research, the metaphor sentence "Social justice is like/similar to ………… Because……." was sent to the students by e-mail and the data were collected in the same way. The content analysis technique was used in the analysis of the data. At the end of the content analysis, it was seen that the most produced metaphors in terms of frequency were scales, equality, no justice, water, sun, tree, sword and house. The metaphors produced by the students were categorized by the researchers. These categories are being a tool that provides equality (equivalence), lack of justice, basic need, being a tool that provides the right, being a source of order in society, representing goodness and righteousness, being dependent on power, being safe, providing freedom, being protective, it is a concept that requires attention, being enlightening, being valuable. The category, which includes metaphors describing the lack of social justice, differs from other categories in this respect. In this category, students used metaphors such as no justice, ghost, so-called, fantasy, utopia and lie. The findings of the study were compared with the findings of similar studies in the literature and various suggestions were presented in this direction.