Dorothy ElderAs we collect information around why college students do or do not vote, one of the variables explored was evaluating how qualified students felt they were to participate in politics. As social media has come to the forefront in idea-spreading and mass-communication, I decided to test if users of certain social media platforms feel more qualified to participate in politics than users of other social media platforms. Therefore, my null and alternative hypotheses are as follows; Null hypothesis: There is no correlation between how qualified respondents feel to participate in politics and their social media of choice. Alternative hypothesis: There is a correlation between how qualified respondents feel to participate in politics and their social media of choice. In order to test the hypothesis, our independent variable is the respondent’s social media of choice. Our dependent variable is how qualified the respondent feels to participate in politics. Therefore, the causal mechanism, in theory, is that a college student’s social media platform of choice causes the amount the student feels qualified to participate in politics because certain social media platforms offer more or less information about politics or access to information about politics depending on the platform’s design or goal. A collaborative study done by multiple universities in Pakistan suggested that college student’s online political activities strongly correlate to political awareness and offline political participation (Ahmad, 2019). Thus, there is reason to believe this causal mechanism is valid. In a study done by the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers sought to find a correlation between digital media and political participation, and found that there is no statistically significant relationship between digital media use (in general) and political participation in college students (Bimber, 2011). In the study’s conclusion, the researchers suggest that there is strong evidence that the relationship between digital media and political participation is idiosyncratic (Bimber, 2011). Thus, it is appropriate to further the study’s findings by breaking down digital media use by platform, to find if a singular platform yields more political participation, or feeling of qualification to participate in college students. Overall, our hypothesis is important as we try to understand why some college students do not participate in politics by hopefully identifying one or more of the independent variables (social media platform of choice) as a causal mechanism for lack of political participation. This could help us understand the low voter-turnout rate at our own Fort Lewis College, and lead us to ideas around how to increase political participation at the college. We are using a survey of 409 college students to evaluate a potential correlation between social media platform of choice and how qualified the survey taker feels to participate in politics. The independent variable is the social media of choice. Survey respondents had the options of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Other. The question that survey respondents saw was “Which social media platform do you use?” The dependent variable is how qualified the survey takers felt to participate in politics. Survey respondents rated their qualification on a scale of 1-4, 1 being the least qualified and 4 being well qualified. The question that survey respondents saw was “I consider myself well-qualified to participate in politics..”, and the aforementioned scale followed the question. It is important to note that respondents were not actually rating the level to which they actually participate in politics, rather the question aimed to understand the respondent’s sense of qualification. Thus, our results will only reflect that, and so we cannot make any conclusions that state that certain social media platforms yield more political participation. The hypothesis reflects this limitation. Results A Pearson correlation test was used to test the hypothesis. The column, Pearson Correlation is what we are testing for statistical significance. Statistical significance at the .05 level, is indicated by the symbol, **, which is not present for any of the results. Thus, our conclusion is: We fail to reject the null hypothesis at the .05 significance value. However, we can still use our data to give us an idea of which social media platform choices had users that felt more qualified to participate in politics. The highest values in the 'Pearson Correlation' column indicate that these users feel the most qualified to participate in politics. It follows, that our findings suggest Facebook users feel the most qualified to participate in politics, followed by 'Other', followed by Twitter, followed by Instagram. Snapchat users felt the least qualified to participate in politics. Granted, none of these findings are statistically significant, so we are limited to acknowledging these results without validating them. Still, these findings could prompt further research into the independent variables that yielded almost significant results, like Facebook and Snapchat. The following are graphs that compare the mean answer to 'I consider myself qualified to participate in politics' (on the left) and the answer to the same question, but only including responses from those who prefer the social media platform that is shown in the label of the graph (on the right). References
Bimber, B. & Copeland L. (2011). Digital Media and Political Participation Over Time in the US: Contingency and Ubiquity. University of California, Santa Barbara. Retrieved from https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/db466b6c-9c16-4491-b92a-32f1b0e80273.pdf. Ahmad, T., Alvi, A., & Ittefaq, M. (2019). The Use of Social Media on Political Participation Among University Students: An Analysis of Survey Results From Rural Pakistan. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019864484
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