Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
HITIT THEOLOGY JOURNAL, cilt.21, sa.2, ss.1005-1036, 2022 (ESCI)
Shopping malls are among the important social and consumption spaces of modern life. They are centers of life and attractions and have the power to influence individuals and societies. Shopping malls produce different kinds of cultural forms, communal forms, symbolic codes and universes of meaning while changing the social worlds of individuals, their relationships and the meanings they attach to many concepts. Shopping malls create significant opportunities for social scientific research with the crowds formed in these spaces, and their characteristics and social depth. The problem of this research is to discover what kind of social, symbolic, imaginary and metaphoric meanings consumers attach to these spaces. The aim of this study is to analyze the different meanings that shopping mall visitors ascribe to these centers and to reveal the essence of the individual's experiences with a phenomenological sociological approach.This study aims to analyze shopping malls in terms of consumer discourse, thus, exploring contemporary consumer societies through shopping malls from a social scientific approach. There are many studies on shopping malls in various disciplines. In the studies carried out in the field of sociology, these places are; public, urban, leisure and consumption spaces. Although there are various studies on the consumption -shopping mall relationship, there is no research that examines the meanings shopping mall users attach to these places with a phenomenological pattern, which makes our study unique in the field of sociology of religion. The significance of our research lies in the systematical revealing of the meanings that consumers attach to shopping malls, and doing so directly from the point of view of consumers, contributing to the existing research of the social reality of consumption and today's societies, filling the gap in the fields of sociology and sociology of religion, and guiding to new research possibilities.Qualitative methods and phenomenological design are applied in the study. With the phenomenological pattern, it is tried to understand what meanings consumers attach to shopping malls and how they interpret their experiences. In the study, in-depth interviews based on a semi-structured interview form were conducted with 20 participants with different socio-demographic characteristics selected through a study group of a maximum diversity sample. Content analysis was performed on the data in accordance with the phenomenological analysis stages. The interviews were first transcribed, then read several times, reviewed and then encoded. The encoded data were first brought together within the framework of categories and then common themes. Then, the data were synthesized in a way to present a general interpretation of the phenomenon and tried to be read within the framework of the phenomenological sociological context. As a result of the research, it is seen that shopping malls are interpreted in different contexts, and the themes reached are presented under two basic themes as sections from "panorama of consumption" and "panorama of hierophany ".