Use of methodology in turkish public administration research

Use of methodology in social sciences is increasingly being important since appropriate use of methodology contributes significantly in producing knowledge to any given area of study. Scholars of public administration need to focus on big questions to enhance their field as a science. Data and use of methodology are important and helpful to answer these big questions. This paper provides a broad perspective for Turkish public administration research. In this sense, the study includes an attempt to search answer for the question of “What is the current situation of public administration research in Turkey?”. There are also some essential sub-questions: Who are publishing articles in the Review of Public Administration (Amme ？daresi Dergisi) journal? Academicians and practitioners? It is important to find out the relation between practitioners who are in the field and academicians who use both theory and applied research in their studies. What are the main research topics of the public administration articles? Are these articles building theories or testing theories? What are the focus of these articles? Are there efficient research methods in these articles? What are the research steps? Are these researches funded by an institutions or other type of supporters? What kind of methods, experimental analyses or statistical techniques are applied in these articles? What type of data and unit of analysis have these articles? Data for this study were gathered from a content analysis of published articles in the Review of Public Administration (Amme ？daresi Dergisi) journal in Turkey. This journal is the only one in the area of public administration which is indexed in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). To analyze the data, T and Chi Square tests are applied. In order to explain strength and relation between different variables Levene’s test, Chi Square test and Phi (Coefficients) analysis methods were also applied. Around 700 articles, which were published in the journal during the 20 years between 1990 and 2009, were reviewed. These articles were coded in terms of descriptive information and their methodology usages. General information about the authors includes the number of authors, institutional information/affiliation of authors, academic degree of the first authors, and funding resources of the researches. In order to analyze (i) main research topics, (ii) the area of research, (iii) theory testing, and (iv) general approach, the study benefited from the methodologies of Stallings and Ferris (1988) and Houston and Delevan (1990). The findings, which