Abstract
Metaphoric Perceptions of Senior University Students on the Concept of Head of Department
The study aims to determine how senior university students conceptualize and perceive
the concept of department head through metaphors. Head of department; It is important
to work on this issue due to the high level of communication with senior management,
lecturers, students, and other staff. In the study, phenomenological design, one of the
qualitative research methods, was used, and the criterion sampling technique, one of
the purposeful sampling methods, was used in determining the study group. A total of
165 license senior students studying at Bingöl University in the 2020-2021 academic
year were included in the research. The metaphor sentence was sent online to the license
senior students at the university. The "content analysis" technique was used in the
analysis of the data. According to the results of the research, the categories created with
the metaphors produced by the senior university students in terms of frequency; guiding
(f = 26), helpful and protective (f = 25), friendly and understanding (f = 19), solving
problems (f = 15), valuable (f = 12), invisible (f = 11), competent and responsible (f = 10),
insensitive (f = 9), knowledgeable (f = 9), selfless and hardworking (f = 8), insufficient
(f = 8), complementary (f = 6), bias (f = 3), communication source (f = 2), reachable (f
= 2), it was found to be under 15 categories in total. The most "father" metaphor was
produced by the senior university students (f = 11). As a result, license senior students of
Bingöl University expect their department heads to be paternalists and prefer to create a
paternalist relationship environment.
Keywords
Head of Department, Metaphor, Friendly, Paternalism, Guiding.
