THE CITY IMAGES FORMED BY CRIMES EFFEKCTS AS SEEN BY FRESHMEN: A CASE STUDY OF PÉCS

Abstract

The image of cities are formed by several factors among others by natural, historical, architectural background, and also about place marketing. Crime events can easily modify the long term developed positive city image. This paper aims to investigate the effect of crimes on city image through the eyes of first year university students. The main research question was if crimes can influence a city image in a way that it has an impact on the students’ choice of place of higher education. If crime has an effect on the city’s image, how can they modify the perceptions of the city?

Two main methodological tools were applied. A questionnaire was set up for the first year geography students at University of Pécs (based on 46 respondents). The sampling involved questions about the city (previous knowledge, associations) and about the Pécs related crimes. The second pillar was a content analysis about how the city of Pécs appeared in media before the university application season (01/08/2012 – 31/01/2013). Two leading Hungarian televisions’ news and six online media were selected by their amount of viewers and readers.

The results of the investigation showed that students ground their choice of their future university on the information from media and friends’ influence, rather than the information provided by the target institution itself. Moreover, for nationwide media a large city – on Hungarian scale – could be interesting mostly in cases of negative news. Despite of it the amount of crimes has no direct influence on the students’ choice of university. Supposedly, it is because of the similar rate of crime in other Hungarian cities. Moreover, in order to enrol more students in the future both the city and the university have to focus on handling the negative news with well-phrased and considered marketing campaign in the national media.