Abstract
Applying consistent precautionary measures and politics and taking the regional development in the distribution of investments into consideration become inevitable for providing development in Turkey’s regions. In this research, the development levels of all cities in Turkey are aimed to be measured from a socio-cultural framework. For this purpose, homogenous city groups are constructed by using multivariate statistical methods from the socio-cultural indices of all cities. Convenient dimension is found by principal component analysis and factor analysis is used to determine which variables can be grouped under certain factors. The variables which are obtained from factor analysis are used in cluster analysis for classifying the cities that have not been classified before in terms of socio-cultural framework. The obtained number of clusters is considered as a prior information for discriminant analysis, and it is used to gather an idea on the classification success of groups obtained by the cluster analysis. Moreover, by using discriminant analysis, important variables that discriminate groups from each other are determined. The socio-cultural development ranking of the cities, obtained at the end of this study, are compared with the ranking of the cities in terms of socio-economic development index, which was obtained by the State Planning Organization and published in 2003.