Kalkan Turkish Local News recently invited its members to take part in a survey about Kalkan.  

Over a two week period, some 406 people answered our questions, and we would like to thank everyone who took the time to complete the survey.

Here, we introduce the findings of the 2010/2011 survey.

The analysis - Kalkan Belediye
All summary data will be shared with the Belediye.  Some of you chose to take up the option to record general comments.  These comments are being translated into Turkish and will be passed on to the Belediye.  We will review them first to remove any details that would obviously identify the author.  

We would like to express our thanks to Turkish language teacher, Osman Tok, for agreeing to translate the comments.  Çok teşekkür ederim.

The analysis - KTLN guests and members
Every KTLN member who took part in the survey will shortly receive an email from us, with their own personal copy of the findings.

Members who decided not to take part, and non-members will see highlights in a number of local news articles that we will be publishing over the coming days - starting tomorrow morning.

We won't be publishing all of the general comments, however we will give you a flavour of what was said.

Do your views matter?
Yes, we think they do matter.  And importantly, so does the Belediye.  Moreover, so do local business people we have spoken to.

Yes, we are guests in a foreign country, but collectively, we do make a significant contribution to the economy of Kalkan, and it is hardly surprising therefore, that locals would be interested to know what we think.

Are these views representative of all visitors to Kalkan?
Truly, there is no way of telling.  The survey was open to all.  Over 400 people chose to express their views, which is quite a large sample size, for a place the size of Kalkan.  

If you look at the size of the household/group represented by each respondent, you could say that these views represent over 1,200 visitors to Kalkan.

What we can say with some certainty is that the people who chose to take part should have a good knowledge of Kalkan.  The vast majority of respondents have:

• been to Kalkan recently,
• stayed here for several weeks minimum (in any given year), and
• been coming for years

So it's fair to say that our respondents know what they are talking about.  It is also reasonable to assume, that given our guarantee of anonymity, the views expressed are genuine and not 'sugar coated'.

Admittedly, if there are any people out there who came to Kalkan and hated it, they are unlikely to be visiting the Kalkan Turkish Local News website.  So perhaps we should accept there will be a marginal element of rose tinted specs going on here.

And it goes without saying, that as this is an English language website, we have not attracted that many non-British respondents - they represent just 7% of our respondents. 

How should we interpret the data?
We did our best to phrase the questions in an unbiased way.  We believe the data is quite robust, and provides a reliable snapshot of what foreign visitors and residents are thinking.

The survey provides us with four main areas of information, which we will bring to you over the coming days.  

1. Visitor demographics - a profile of foreigners in Kalkan (published on Friday 25th February 2011)
2. Coming to Kalkan - how you get here and where you stay (published on Saturday 26th February 2011)
3. Property ownership (published on Sunday 27th February 2011)
4. What you think about Kalkan (published on Monday 28th February 2011)

In addition to the bare statistics, we can add some flavour to the bare numbers, by telling you what the key messages were in the optional comments that some people left.

We start publication of the results tomorrow, with visitor demographics. 

We do not have a problem with individuals sharing this information, however we would respectfully ask that our work is not simply copied and pasted on to other websites.

If any other website wishes to comment or report on the survey, we are happy for them to do so, but would ask for credit to be given to Kalkan Turkish Local News, and a link to KTLN placed on their website.