Discovering Socialization Priorities in Turkish Society Based on What the Value of Success Means
Ayşe Aypay
Faculty of Education, Eskişehir Osmangazi University, Meşelik Campus, Eskişehir, 26480 TurkeyAbstract
The purpose of this study is to discover socialization priorities based on what the value of success means in Turkish society. For this purpose, two related scales have been developed to identify the beliefs of adults in Turkish society towards defining the value of success and the areas in which adults perceive themselves as successful based on these cultural definitions. Inferences were made regarding the constructs that were revealed in these scales as to whether the cultural evaluation of Turkish society as individualistic or collectivist, which had previously been accepted as collectivist in the literature, had changed based on the relationships between scales. This is a correlational study whose participants were composed of a sample of 962 individuals selected through purposive sampling from five different regions of Turkey based on accessibility and availability. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out. The common factor structures of both scales showed four important phenomena (social sensitivity and altruism, general self-efficacy and control, self-reconciliation, and a life free of problems in personal relations) that Turkish society attaches importance to.