Civic Life in Rural America Revisited: The Role of Social and Mobile News on Civic Participation

ABSTRACT

Rural America has been suffering from insufficient civic resources and is often characterized as a “civic desert.” Drawing upon the Communication Infrastructure Theory, this study surveys residents in Oregon (N = 564) and explores the ways in which social and mobile news use, along with other traditional storytelling networks, relate to rural and non-rural residents’ civic participation. Results showed that the types of communities moderated the effects of social and mobile news usage on online civic participation. This study expands upon scholarly concerns about the possible side effects of emerging media storytelling networks on civic life in local community contexts.

Note

1. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to verify validity of media storytelling network measurements. For each construct, the values of composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), and Cronbach’s α all exceeded the thresholds of 0.7, 0.5, and 0.7, respectively. Legacy news (CR = 0.84, $\sqrt{\mathrm{A}\mathrm{V}\mathrm{E}}=0.721)$; Social and mobile news (CR = 0.876, $\sqrt{\mathrm{A}\mathrm{V}\mathrm{E}}=0.802)$; Internet news (CR = 0.849, $\sqrt{\mathrm{A}\mathrm{V}\mathrm{E}}=0.859)$. Model fit: χ²/df= 4.49, p < .001, CFI = 0.968, GFI = 0.947, NFI = 0.960, RMSEA = 0.079 with a 90% CI [0.068, 0.090]. Additionally, the square root of the AVE extracted from each construct was higher than the correlations with other variables, suggesting acceptable discriminant validity (Hair et al., 2010).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Oregon Office of Rural Health (2020), https://www.ohsu.edu/oregon-office-of-rural-health/about-rural-and-frontier-data

² Demographic variables (i.e., age, gender, race, education, income, and length of residence) were included as controls.

³ The number in the markers shows the number of participants who shared the same ZIP code. In this study, 221 (39.2%) participants were from Multnomah County, whose county seat is Portland. Additionally, 164 (29.1%) were from Washington County, 136 (24.1%) from Clackamas County, 25 (4.4%) from Yamhill County, 11 (2.0%) from Columbia County, and 7 (1.2%) from other counties. Among the participants (N = 71) whose ZIP code matched ORH’s rural classification (https://www.ohsu.edu/media/881), 63 (88.7%) came from Columbia (population: 53,074, with 3 newspapers), Yamhill (108,239, 2 newspapers), and Clackamas counties (422,537, 8 newspapers), all of which include a large portion of rural areas (Abernathy, 2019; US Census, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chun Shao

Chun Shao is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a graduate research fellow at the Media, Information, Data, and Society (MIDAS) lab, Arizona State University. His research interests focus on communication technology, audience behaviors, and political communication.

K. Hazel Kwon

K. Hazel Kwon (Ph.D., SUNY-Buffalo) is associate professor and the director of the Media, Information, Data, and Society (MIDAS) lab at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University. Her research explores how networked digital conditions enable or obstruct informed public and participation.

Seungahn Nah

Seungahn Nah (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. His research centers on the roles of digital communication technologies, including Artificial Intelligence enabled technologies, in democratic processes and outcomes.