Investigating the Students’ Perceptions of the Democratic Values of Academicians

Abstract

The aim of the study is to investigate how university students percieve academicians’ democratic values, and whether their perceptions on it differ significantly according to certain variables. Designed as a descriptive quantitative research, this study employs of 248 students studying at the Faculty of Education and Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences in Usak University as its participants. “The Scale of Students’ Perceptions of the Academicians’ Democratic Values” was developed and utilized for the study by the researcher. The resulting 6-dimension structure explains 62,831% of the phenomenon in total. In addition to the construct validity, Cronbach’s Alpha Internal Consistency Coefficient was calculated and it was found ,927. The academicians’ perceived level of having democratic values was found to be 2,43. The findings indicated that the academicians had democratic attitudes at low levels based on the students’ perceptions. They attributed much more importance to “respecting institutional rules and regulations” and "giving importance to equality” compared to other four dimensions. The academicians give least importance to the “democratic role modelling behaviours”. Furthermore, the results indicated that there were statistically significant differences according to certain demographic variables.