A sociological research on the relationship of freedom and religion in the perspective of university students

The subject of the research is relationship between liberty and religion. In human history relationship between liberty and religion is always a daily subject and some researches must be done about the topic. This research aims how university students analyse relationship between liberty and religion. Freedom and religion are phenomena related to each other for many reasons, and it is aimed to conduct such a study in the field of Sociology of Religion in order to determine the dimensions of the relationship between these two phenomena. The study consists of an introduction and five parts. In the introduction section; The problem of the research situation, purpose and importance of the research are stated and the hypotheses to be tested are given. In the first part; The definitions of the concepts of freedom and religion, the mutual interaction of religion and society, the philosophical and sociological context of the concept of freedom, its history, the positioning of the concept of freedom in terms of Islamic belief and the relationship between freedom and religion are discussed. In the second part; The model, design, sample and method of the research are given. Since the research was conducted with a qualitative study that supports the quantitative study that is deemed appropriate in exploratory design studies, mixed method was used in the research. The qualitative study was carried out in two stages. In the first stage, three dimensions (individual, social, political) were categorized using the codes of the relationship between freedom and religion. In the second stage, it was determined in which sentences the participants who contributed to the qualitative study mostly expressed the relationship between freedom and religion, and based on these data, a unique scale called "Perceived Freedom-Religion Relationship Scale" was developed for quantitative study. The developed scale was applied to first and fourth grade students in four different universities (Dicle University, Akdeniz University, İnönü University, Selçuk University), three different faculties (Faculty of Theology, Faculty of Education, Departments that Accept Students with Aptitude Test). The data obtained as a result of the application were uploaded to the digital environment and statistical operations were performed with the SPSS 22 program. In the third chapter; The findings obtained from the research are given in the form of tables and interpreted. In the last part, a broad evaluation of the hypotheses was made based on the findings and the literature. According to the results obtained from the findings, while university students' perceptions of the relationship between freedom and religion differ from according to independent variables, there are different dimensions in their perceptions of the relationship between freedom and religion. Students who see themselves as religious feel free on an individual level; However, it was seen that their freedoms were limited in the social dimension and that most of them demanded freedom in the political dimension. Although the understanding of freedom is among the reasons for differentiation, it has been understood that the most important factor is the effect of the belief that the person has and the measure of religiosity. In addition, in the context of freedom and religion, it was perceived that university students formed difirent profiles on the basis of university and faculty. Keywords: Perception, Religion, Freedom, University Youth.