Investigation of 4th grade students' perception of social values

This study was conducted in order to investigate 4th grade elementary students' perceptions of social values. This study is a descriptive survey study to analyze 4th grade students' perceptions of social values in terms of different variables. The population of the study consists of 5072 4th grade students who are enrolled in schools in the 2015-2016 academic year in the city center of Siirt Province, Turkey. The sample of the study was chosen through typical case sampling from the population and includes 726 4th graders who were enrolled in four different primary schools in Siirt city center. 275 questionnaires which included missing data or incorrectly filled out were excluded from the study and final analysis was performed with the remaining 451 valid questionnaires. Personal Information Form and Perception of Social Values scale were used in the study. The gathered data were analyzed using SPSS software. In analyzing the data, descriptive statistics including means, standard deviation, and frequency distributions were used. Non-parametric test, namely Mann-Whitney U-test, was used in order to determine students' perceptions of the social values differ based on the gender variable. Kruskal Wallis test was applied to see the relationship between variables in the Personal Information Form and students' perception of social values. In addition, Mann-Whitney U test was used to see which variables show statistical variance between groups. In interpreting the findings, p-value of .05 was deemed as statistically significant for the study. At the end of the study, findings have shown that scores for perception of social values are not statistically significant in terms of such variables as gender, mothers' education level, duration of watching TV per day and type of programs watched on TV, whereas perception of societal values scores are significant in terms of number of siblings, fathers' education level, income level and location of household in which the respondents are living. Keywords: Value, social values, elementary education