Main Study 1: Large Survey

Purpose and Rationale

The purpose of the survey was to contribute towards addressing the first two objectives of the study, i.e. to capture the civic attitudes and internet preferences of the members of the chosen student community. As is the case for any one-off survey, this investigation is only a snapshot of attitudes in that specific point in time – albeit a very comprehensive and revealing snapshot.

One of that method’s main strengths is that it allows for a large number of factors and variables to be assessed in a short period of time. It therefore constitutes the basis upon which more in-depth, qualitative research was conducted in the latter stages of the project.

One important aim of this survey was to assess the level and extent of youth disengagement from political participation and democracy in general, as well as the participants’ attitudes towards a range of civic engagement methods and public affairs. Some of the main research questions covered in this survey relate to the issue of whether young people see the impact of broader structures on themselves and, conversely, whether they are aware of the civic aspect and political potential of everyday activities; in other words, their level of political socialisation and integration. Another major part of the survey covered their news consumption and internet use patterns in order to evaluate the extent to which the net is integrated in respondents’

everyday life.

Sampling and Data Collection

Sampling for the survey was purposive and was not supposed to represent British youth at large, but to capture the attitudes of a particular student community with interesting traits of civic engagement and internet uses, as mentioned earlier. As Ogan, Ozakca and Groshek (2008: 170) note, “by virtue of purposively sampling the heaviest and youngest adult users, emerging sociocultural patterns may be identified and contextualized with current ones”.

Data collection took place during the first 15 minutes of lectures and seminars in many units and programmes across Bournemouth University’s Media School (TMS). While students were free to opt out of the survey, all students attending classes chose to complete it (the details of data collection sessions are presented in Table B3). The total number of undergraduate students at Bournemouth Media School at the time of the survey (22 November – 10

December 2004) was 1631, of which 487 took part in the research – i.e. almost one in three TMS undergrads took part in the survey.

The demographic data showed that the sample mirrors the makeup of the School’s

undergraduate population and, subsequently, reflects its demographic skews: a 2/1 females-males ratio, while one-half of the sample come from the South East or the South West of England. The mean age was 19.72 and the sample was quite clustered around the ages of

18-21, thus age was not used further in subsequent crosstabulations and tests [for a profile of the sample see Table B4]. Nine participants (1.85% of the sample) were above the age of 25 but as it was observed that their responses were largely typical of the sample, they were not excluded from the study.

Survey Structure and Variables

Initial pilots carried out on the first draft of the survey with five third-year undergraduates (who did not subsequently take part in the main data collection) showed that the questionnaire was too long and took up to 18 minutes to complete. The questionnaire was revised and the overall number of variables was reduced from 119 to 102 by merging overlapping variables, collapsing options into broader ones and simplifying the design of the Likert-scale cells. Further pilots showed that the second draft was both easier to comprehend and quicker to complete with an average completion time of 12 minutes.

The final draft of the questionnaire (8 pages – Appendix C) included 102 variables that can be sorted into six sets or factors (excluding basic demographic questions):

F1: active engagement F2: civic attitudes

F3: interest in issues/policies F4: news media use

F5: awareness of international news F6: internet access, use and problems

The survey’s questions comprised a mixture of parameters traditionally used in existing literature and measurements developed for the purposes of this study. Some of the active engagement variables (v10-19) were taken from Verba, Scholzman and Brady (1995) and Weber, Loumakis and Bergman (2003). The question on societal change (v28) was taken from Inglehart (1990, cited in Muller and Seligson, 1994). The motivators for internet usage (v76-80) were adapted from LaRose, Mastro and Eastin (2001); key demographics on internet access and usage (v67-75 and 81-90) were chosen from King (2001); while internet problems

variables (v91-99) were inspired by Newhagen and Rafaeli’s (1996) discussion on how obstacles can affect the experience of users.

In addition to those questions, several original measurements were drafted specifically for this study. These included one question (v29) focusing on the motivating factors of participation distinguishing between civic duty, own interest and rejection of participation. Moreover, participants were presented with a list of methods for voice expression and participation and were asked to evaluate their effectiveness using a Likert scale (v20-27).

A critical section of the survey presented respondents with a list of 25 issues (ranging from climate change to sexually transmitted diseases) and areas of public policy (ranging from foreign policy to education). Each set of policy areas had two or more variables phrased in different ways (some were oriented towards the individual respondent, e.g. “my career prospects”, while others were oriented towards the collective or public good, e.g.

“unemployment”). Before the actual survey, a model was developed linking those variables (e.g. cancer research to the NHS); the ‘null hypothesis’ being that respondents would not recognise the links between paired issues (thus ranking one high and the other low). In the

actual questionnaire those 25 issues were presented in random order so as not to lead the respondents, who were asked to state how much they cared for each one using an 1-5 Likert scale (v31-55).

Furthermore, five general knowledge multiple-choice questions assessed respondents’

familiarity with global affairs (the European Union, the Olympic Games) and knowledge of international stories that were very topical at the time of the survey (hostage-taking in Beslan, string of lethal hurricanes in the Americas) (v62-66). Table B1 details the links between

specific variables of the survey (column 4) and the research questions of the study (column 2) so as to aid transparency and precision.

Data Analysis

The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 14.0) was used for inputting and analysis of the data from the survey. For the sake of clarity and simplicity, the details and specifics of the data analysis process (e.g. statistical tests performed) are explained along with the presentation of the results and supplementary materials.

Overall, the data was analysed in four stages. Initially, frequencies of all 102 variables were analysed in order to get a first impression of the results. A process of collapsing variables into composite ones was then followed. For instance, the responses to the five international news quiz questions were collapsed into a composite variable showing how many correct answers each respondent got (out of five, ranging from 0.00, 0.20, 0.40 etc to 1.00). Also, the results from the eight variables assessing the effectiveness of engagement methods (such as voting, discussing, protesting etc) were added into a new composite variable; the point of that was to distinguish between those who have a sceptical attitude towards those methods of civic engagement in general (e.g. if they’ve scored close to the minimum of 8) and those that are more positive and optimistic about the effectiveness of those methods in general (scoring closer to the max of 40). A similar procedure was followed for the variables covering internet-related problems so as to distinguish between those who, overall, face more problems with the internet and those who do not. Following from that, we focused on five of the six sets/areas of variables mentioned above (F1, F2, F4, F5, F6) and selected twenty-four key variables that could potentially produce valid and useful crosstabulations (C1 – C10) that link to the study’s objectives. These are outlined in more detail in the following two chapters. [For a snapshot of these crosstabulations see Table B5].

The third stage of data analysis focused on F3, i.e. the twenty-five issues and policy areas that respondents were asked to rate. In addition to a means analysis, a correlation matrix and an hierarchical cluster analysis were performed so as to find links and patterns of responses amongst issues. In the fourth and final stage of the analysis, gender was crosstabulated with all original and composite variables so as to establish whether it was a significant factor in all aspects of the survey. This was deemed particularly necessary due to the sample’s (and the specific community’s) female skew, but also because of the ongoing discussion about the gender divide in internet access/uses (Liff, Shepherd, Wajcman, Rice and Hargittai 2004) and in civic attitudes (see the report on the ‘activism gap’ by the Electoral Commission 2004).

Limitations and Synergies

The generic limitations of large, quantitative surveys have been extensively discussed in the literature (e.g. see Little 1991 for the philosophical and epistemological critiques to statistical analysis). These include the close-ended nature of the questions, which the researcher has formulated perhaps charged with their own cultural or epistemological baggage. By listing the origins of the survey’s variables and explaining their rationale it is hoped that such risks can be minimised. Lack of depth and the inability to offer in-depth accounts of motives and causes are also common problems of surveys. That issue was subsequently addressed by triangulating and complementing the survey data with a comprehensive, qualitative study involving a sub-sample of students who took part in the survey (Main Study 3 below).

There are obviously additional limits to what this particular survey can achieve given the fact that it sampled a single student community. While a significant proportion (almost one-third) of that community took part in the study, one should still be very cautious when making

generalisations or projections to the rest of the UK youth populations especially given the gender and regional slant of the sample. Hence, the survey should be viewed as a tool for the understanding of the community (as a case study of UK youth), which itself has a strong gender imbalance. Finally, as in every such study there is a third set of limitations – resource restrictions; more depth and more questions would have been ideal, although any survey containing many more than 102 variables and taking much longer than 13’ to complete would raise other methodological problems (respondents’ attention, reliability of responses etc).

Therefore a balance was sought between depth and accessibility.