Students’ Metaphorical Perceptions Towards Shopping Malls (Sample of Erzurum)

Several shops from different sectors in shopping malls provide customers with thousands of products very popular in the world in an organized and systematic way. Shopping malls do not just provide the customers with the things they need, but they also help them have a good time through different art and cultural activities. In this sense, it would be better to find out some perceptions on shopping malls the number of which increases and which have greater importance in people’s lives day by day. This study was carried out to investigate students’ perceptions on shopping malls and thus followed phenomenological research design, one of the qualitative research designs. The participants of this study consisted of 23 girls and 43 boys (66 in total) from university and high school students. The data were collected through the sentence of “a shopping mall is like………………..because………………” completed by the participants. The data were analyzed by content analysis. This study in which university students produced more metaphors reached totally 33 metaphors. The common metaphors produced by both university and high-school students were as follows: “Magnet, blackhole, time machine, thief, and ocean”. On the other hand, some negative metaphors in the meaning of removing time perception and of damaging material and sentimental values were suggested by the participants. Keywords: Shopping malls, students, metaphor