Impact of Social Media Usage on Youth’s Political Participation in Muang District, Phetchabun Province

Abstract

This research aims to explore the impact of social media usage on youth’s political participation in Muang district, Phetchabun province by applying survey research with a quantitative methodology. Samplings are 400 youths in Muang district, Phetchabun province. The research instrument is an online questionnaire. The statistics used to analyze data consist of frequency distribution, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and multiple regression analysis using the stepwise method.

The results show that 63% of the samples are females, and 37% are males. 85% of the samples use social media daily. 45.5% of the samples use Facebook the most. 58.3% use social media more than 5 hours per day.

The analysis of the impact of social media usage on political participation among youths is used to select independent variables to obtain an appropriate regression equation using the stepwise method. It is found that 3 independent variables including the period of social media usage, presentation style, and frequency of social media usage together predict the impact of social media usage on youth’s political participation with statistically significant (p-value < 0.001). This indicates that the period of social media usage, presentation style, and frequency of social media usage has an impact on youth’s political participation. Furthermore, the period of social media usage has the highest forecast weight, followed by presentation style and frequency of social media usage. The coefficients of predictive variables in standard score (β) are 0.373, 0.277 and 0.157, and raw score (b) is 0.356, 0.287 and 0.150, respectively. All three variables can explain the participation variation of 52.1 percent of youth’s political participation (R² = 52.1).

The forecasting equation of factors that impacted youth’s political participation is written in the forms of a raw score and standard score as follows;

The forecasting equation of raw score

Youths’ Political Participation = 0.696 + 0.356 (Period of SM Usage) + 0.287 (Presentation Style) +0.015 (Frequency of SM usage)

The forecasting equation of standard score

𝑍_{Youths’Political Participation} = 0.373 (𝑧_{Period of SM Usage}) + 0.277 (𝑧_{Presentation Style}) + 0.157 (𝑧_{Freequency of SM Usage})