Educational - Ozean Publications

European Journal of Educational Studies 2(2), 2010European Journal of Educational Studies 2(2), 2010ISSN 1946-6331© 2010 Ozean PublicationThe Perceived Corporate Image of Private Secondary Schools By Students’ andParents’ Views *Soner POLAT*, Elif Abat** and Songül Tezyürek***Kocaeli University Faculty of Education**Kocaeli University Institute of Social Sciencese-mail address for correspondence: spolat@kocaeli.edu.tr_____________________________________________________________________________________Abstract : The purpose of this research is to determine the corporate image of secondary schools inKocaeli according to students’ and parents’ opinions. The population of the research is the privatesecondary schools in Kocaeli. Of the thirteen private secondary schools, nine of them accepted toparticipate in the study. The formation of an overall image requires quite a long time; therefore thestudents of the final grade and their parents amounting to a number of 800 participants were chosen asthe sample of the study. The data was collected by a scale developed by the researchers using the existingscales by Kazoleas, Kim and Moffitt (2001). The findings suggest that, of the different types of image,namely the academic quality image, social image, infrastructure and facility image, physical appearanceimage and programme image, the most positively perceived one was the academic quality image.Appearance image, social image, infrastructure and facility image and programme image followed. Otherfindings suggest that students’ and parents’ perceptions concerning the school image were different, inthat parents had more positive image perceptions than students. Different types of image perceptionsdiffered in terms of gender among students and parents.Keywords: Organizational image, secondary education, private education_____________________________________________________________________________________PROBLEM STATEMENTFor organizations, the term image has been a subject of interest because of its outcomes and its greateffect. While in literature, there has been a plenty of research on corporate image both in theory andpractice over the last 20 years, related research on corporate image is restricted to a few theoretical andpractical studies in Turkey.Dichter (1985) defines image as positive or negative thoughts about an object or an entity formed in acertain amount of time with the effects of internal and external factors (Cited in: Gemlik & Sığrı, 2007 ).Dutton and Dukerich (1991), defined image as the way organization members believe others see theorganization, to gauge how outsiders are judging them. Corporate image is the mental picture of anorganization held by its audiences regarding this organization. The mental picture formed in one‟s mindabout an organization upon hearing its name or seeing its logo is about this organization‟s corporateimage (Gray & Balmer, 1998). According to Hatch and Schultz (2002), image is how organization* This paper was presented in the I. International Congress of Educational Research between 1-3 May inÇanakkale - Turkey65