ÖDÜŞ Student-Friendly University Cities

Being a university student is not only an academic process lived on campus. The city where a student studies forms a major part of university life through transport, safety, housing, health services, social and cultural opportunities, everyday relationships and how city residents treat students.

Students' relationship with the city can directly affect the quality of their university years. Their daily quality of life is shaped not only by what the university offers but also by how well the city supports student life. Understanding student satisfaction therefore requires looking at the university and the city together.

The Student-Friendly University Cities study (ÖDÜŞ) was launched in 2017 to meet this need. It aims to determine how satisfied students are with the city they study in and to compare cities based on students' satisfaction statements. The approach aligns with the literature on urban life satisfaction, quality of life, place satisfaction and university-city relations (Stedman, 2002; Gumprecht, 2003; Marans & Stimson, 2011).

ÖDÜŞ's aim is to determine students' satisfaction with the city they study in and to rank cities by their assessments. Its core philosophy is that one of the groups best placed to evaluate a university city is the students living their daily lives there.

The primary data source is not municipal or public-institution reporting, economic indicators or infrastructure statistics, but students' direct satisfaction assessments. ÖDÜŞ is not an index of a city's absolute quality of life or municipal performance; the results show how the city is experienced by students.

ÖDÜŞ treats students' city satisfaction as a multidimensional assessment of everyday life. It comprises not only judgements about physical infrastructure but also feeling safe in the city, being able to use transport, participating in social and cultural life, finding solutions to health problems and the quality of relationships with city residents.

This aligns with the subjective-assessment perspective in the place-satisfaction and quality-of-life literature: what cities offer students should be evaluated not only through objective indicators but also through the daily experiences and satisfaction of those living there.

The population consists of formal undergraduate students in Türkiye who live in the relevant city during their studies. The study runs as part of the TÜMA research programme; its sample is built in line with TÜMA's sampling and data-quality assurance processes.

The cities covered each period, total participants and valid city-level sample sizes are published in that year's technical report. Cities are included only when enough valid student responses are obtained. The unit of analysis is the city; any special cases are explained with rationale in the annual technical report.

City scores are intended to represent the views of the city's university students as closely as possible. Sampling follows TÜMA's quota-sampling approach and current YÖK student statistics.

The sample distribution is controlled so that differences in university and programme sizes do not expose city results to the influence of a single institution or student group. Gender and faculty/programme distributions are treated as key representativeness variables. City-level sample sizes and participant distributions are published annually.

Data is collected via the City Satisfaction Scale — ten items on a 10-point Likert scale. The scale assesses students' overall satisfaction with their city across the core areas of daily life.

The ten-item structure assesses city satisfaction holistically through the components of everyday urban life rather than a single question. Internal consistency is monitored each wave; the latest published wave reported a Cronbach's alpha of .92.

ÖDÜŞ data is collected online through the research infrastructure shared with TÜMA. Participants are reached via the ÜniAr Participant Database, survey invitations and student communication channels.

Participants are told the study's purpose and give informed consent online. Students under 18 are not included. Surveys are self-administered on the online platform. Technical indicators such as participant ID, session data, control questions and response times are monitored to support data quality.

Data feeding the city ranking passes through systematic quality-control processes before analysis. The aim is to prevent erroneous, duplicate, inconsistent or unreliable records from affecting city scores.

Only records meeting the quality criteria are used to compute city scores. Cleaning is completed before ranking, so cities are compared over valid responses that passed the same quality standards.

The scale has ten items scored 1–10, so individual city-satisfaction scores range from 10 to 100. Each city's score is the mean of the scale scores of students studying there who meet the quality criteria. Cities are ranked from highest to lowest.

ÖDÜŞ results should not be read as a general quality-of-life score for all residents. They reflect specifically university students' satisfaction with city life.

A city's score is not merely an assessment of municipal services. It reflects a student experience produced jointly by many actors and conditions — transport, safety, social and cultural life, access to health services, relations with shopkeepers and residents' attitudes. Results should therefore be treated as a shared development indicator for municipalities, governorships, universities, professional bodies and other stakeholders.