THE PERCEPTION OF DISCRIMINATION IN TURKEY
frequency of discriminatory treatment in state institutions (police, judiciary,
etc.) to the questionnaire. In the following sections of the study, there are questions to understand people’s feelings and behaviours after being subjected to
discriminatory treatment(s). In the last section, questions aim to grasp the social
positions of subjects to evaluate their perceptions of discrimination and their
behaviours against discriminatory behaviours. These are questions about educational background, gender, age, occupation, income, place of birth, ethnicity,
religious belief/disbelief.
In the second stage of the field research, a focus group discussion is conducted
to learn more about the reasons for the impressive results of the quantitative
analysis. It was decided that only in this way, the role of ethnic origin, political
view, gender and class differences’ in the perception of discrimination could be
understood in full terms. Within this framework, four focus group discussionsall in Istanbul- were held. Two focus group discussions organized separately
for women and men with participants from different political perspectives. In
doing so, the researchers envisaged to facilitate the understanding of the impact
of the gender differences in the perception of discrimination and to prevent the
occurrence of male domination during focus group discussions. The other two
focus group discussions were designed to analyse the impact of socio-economic
status differences on the perception of discrimination. While the first group
includes the people who have a higher status in the social hierarchy in terms
of occupation, education, income level, living environment, housing type and
property ownership level; the second group includes people who have a lower
status in the social hierarchy according to the same criteria. Thus, it is aimed to
deepen the results obtained from quantitative data analysis with the results of
qualitative data analysis.
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