Citizen as urban consumer: An Exploratory sequential mixed study on citizens' urban experiences

The aim of this study is to develop an urban experience theory and accordingly an Urban Experience Scale by exploring the subjective urban experiences of individuals over the age of 18 residing in Aksaray from the theoretical perspectives of consumer experience, consumption experience and consumer space experience in the field of marketing, and to test the theory by associating it with "satisfaction, loyalty, EAI and general life satisfaction", which are frequently discussed as key outcome variables in the consumer experience literature in order to evaluate whether the developed theory is generalizable or not. For this purpose, exploratory sequential mixed methods research was utilized. Within the scope of qualitative research, which is the first stage of the research, interview data were collected from 59 participants living in Aksaray city with semi-structured and photo-based narrative data collection techniques. By analyzing the qualitative data with the inductive method, the experiences of the participants in the context of Aksaray urban space were discovered. Accordingly, the experiences of the participants were categorized into four main categories: the city's indoor assets, the city's outdoor assets, the city's social structure assets and the city's functional assets. In addition, the findings from the qualitative data also revealed patterns between urban experiences and satisfaction, loyalty and positive word-of-mouth behaviors towards the city. Thus, a theory of urban experience emerged after this stage. In the scale development phase, which is the intermediate stage of the study, and within the scope of the quantitative research, it was aimed to develop valid and reliable scales that would serve to measure the experiences related to each interaction point and the theorized outcome concepts in the theory of citizen urban experiences emerging from the qualitative data and to verify the construct validity of these scales. In order to achieve this aim, two field studies were conducted. In the first field study, data were collected from 669 people according to the convenience sampling method. FACTOR software version 12.04.01 was used to analyze the collected data and EFA studies were conducted to evaluate the construct validity of the scales and to examine the underlying dimensionality of the item set. In the second field study, data were collected from 524 people according to the convenience sampling method. CFA and SEM analyses were conducted using Jamovi statistical package program version 2.3.28. As a result of these analyses, four sub-dimensions of the indoor urban experience were obtained for the indoor competence experience, social interaction and symbolic indoor experience, emotional indoor experiences and indoor nostalgia experience. Open space urban experience consisted of six sub-dimensions: urban open space competence experience, social open space experience, aesthetic open space experience, authentic open space experience, emotional open space experience, open space nostalgia and social comfort experience. The social environment experience consisted of six dimensions: social vibrancy experience, close environment development experience, close environment interaction experience, social alienation, local people attitude experience and social symbolic experience. Finally, the functional urban characteristics experiences consisted of nine separate constructs: work conditions, economic living conditions, physical environmental conditions, shopping conditions, urban transportation conditions, housing conditions, accessibility conditions, public service conditions, and crime conditions. The measurement models obtained in the quantitative phase are in good agreement with the data and support the theory put forward in the qualitative phase to a great extent. In addition, the measurement validity results for all scales indicate that the validity of each scale and measurement model can be generalized to the Aksaray city sample. In addition, these scales can be used to examine the differences between groups for individuals with different personal characteristics.