Abstract
This study identifies the typologies of adolescents’ communication channels about political and social issues and further examines the levels of civic literacy and expected political participation across identified groups. We utilized latent profile analysis to examine the representative national sample from South Korea of 2590 adolescents with an average age of 14.01. We were able to characterize four groups, including active participants (8%), moderate participants (15%), bystanders (35%), and passive participants (42%). The bystanders scored significantly higher in civic literacy than the other groups. The passive group had the lowest civic literacy, and the active group had the second lowest score. In terms of expected political participation, the bystanders tended to implement the traditional political participation strategy — electoral participation. The passive group had the lowest willingness to the electoral participation, active participation, and legal participation. The active participant group showed the highest levels of illegal, legal, and active political participation, and the moderate participant group exhibited the second highest levels of the three types of political participation. The intriguing findings show that adolescents with higher usage of delivering their opinions via the Internet and social media have a higher tendency to be involved in illegal participation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Social media, Civic literacy, Expected political participation
