Youth Engagement in Singapore: The Interplay of Social and Traditional Media

Abstract

This research examines the implications of social media use for political engagement among young people in Singapore. The project included a qualitative analysis of a student protest, followed by a national survey of young Singaporeans. The findings suggest that social media use is positively related to traditional political participation, while also providing evidence of the continued importance of traditional media for political engagement. More specifically, we find that the attention paid to news in traditional media is a more important predictor of both traditional and online participation than the generic use of Facebook.

Notes

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the Interactive and Digital Media Cluster at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. They also want to thank all student assistants for their help with collecting the data and their contribution to the earlier conference papers from this project.

Note. P-values are for 2-tailed t-tests. *p < .01.

Note. *p < .05;

** p < .01.