Disaster history of Karapınar district of Konya province and sinkholes in Karapınar district: A study on disaster knowledge of Karapınar people

This study aims to evaluate the awareness levels on disasters and sinkholes of people living in Karapınar district of Konya province. For this purpose, a questionnaire consisting of 20 questions were applied to 500 people living in the region with the face-to-face interview technique. These 500 people were selected equally distributed as 250 males and 250 females. The first 4 questions of the questionnaire consist of demographic information. The questionnaire questions between 5 and 11 were taken into consideration in order to determine the disaster awareness levels of the participants. For the sinkholes awareness levels, a total of 9 items forming from the questions between 12 and 20 in the questionnaire form were taken as basis. Demographic characteristics, averages of the disaster and sinkhole awareness levels of the sample of 500 people participating in the research were determined and hypotheses of the research were tested. SPSS 25 software were used in the data analysis. As the statistical analysis method, frequency analysis was shown in tables. Chi Square test was used as the statistical significance test. At the end of the research, demographic information such as age, education status, gender, marital status was compared one by one with the other questionnaire questions. It was seen at the end of the analyses that disaster awareness level of the participants is low, whereas sinkhole awareness level is high. This situation can be explained by the frequent occurrence of sinkhole event or rare occurrence of the other disasters in the region where the participants live. Also, there is a positive relation between the education status and awareness level of the participants. The participants consider that water consumption is effective in the sinkhole occurrence. Therefore, training and exercises should be given importance to increase the disaster and sinkhole awareness levels. In order to reduce the sinkhole occurrence, water usage must be emphasized, and unnecessary wells and grown agricultural products must be controlled.