Analysis of the stakeholders' opinions about the security problems in the student transportation services

With this research, within the scope of student transportation services, security problems experienced in the school buses are aimed to be determined according to the stakeholders' opinions. In the research, exploratory sequential design, one of the mixed method research designs, was preferred. In this study, firstly, the problems experienced in student transportation services were tried to be determined (Research 1) and then the frequency of the detected problems (Research 2) was tried to be revealed. In the Research 1, examining and describing the security problems experienced in student transportation services in detail was aimed. For this purpose, qualitative interviews were conducted with different stakeholders of education, including students, parents, educators, bus drivers and police officers in the Midyat district of Mardin. Purposeful sampling method was preferred while selecting the participants. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 106 stakeholders in the Research 1. As a result of the research, it was seen that the problems related to student transportation services were listed as problems caused by the school bus, bus drivers, the students, and the route. As a result of qualitative interviews with stakeholders in Research 1, in the Research 2, the opinions of the students, parents and the educators on the frequency of problems in school buses were tried to be determined using a quantitative method. In the Research 2, a questionnaire about the problems experienced in school buses has been developed by using the findings obtained in the qualitative research. In the Research 2, which was designed with the quantitative research paradigm, descriptive and causal comparative design was adopted in order to find answers to the research problems. Study group of the second part of the research consists of 1063 high school students using school buses in Mardin city center, 614 parents and 203 educators who have observations about the school bus. In this research, frequencies and percentages were calculated in the analysis of the responses to the questionnaire items. It was concluded that the qualitative findings and quantitative findings obtained from the research were similar. According to this, findings of the Research 1 and Research 2 were similar in the items of lack of guide personnel in the school bus, broken seat belts or absence of seat belts, absence of in-vehicle security cameras, fatigue of the students due to long road routes, problems caused by the defects, bumps and holes in the roads, the absence of safe loading / unloading stops on the service route, excessive speed of the school bus drivers, drivers' excessive interaction with students, phone calls of the drivers during while driving, improper music choices of the drivers, students' quarrels because of music and seats, students' excessive interactions with drivers, students' not wearing seat belts, walking students' in the school bus. Also in student transportation services; it was concluded that the scores obtained from the items related to the security problems experienced because of the vehicle, route, driver and student differed significantly according to the views of the stakeholders. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that when compared with parents, educators and students think that there are more problems in student transportation services.