Participation in the Youth Civic Web: Assessing User Activity Levels in Web Sites Presenting Two Civic Styles

ABSTRACT

Concerns over youth disengagement from conventional politics mixed with perceptions of youth aptitude for digital media have led scholars and practitioners to investigate civic Web sites as locations of potential youth learning and participation. Over the past few years, the scholarly literature on youth civic Web sites has developed a number of conceptual vocabularies for, and catalogued the nature of, the civic engagement opportunities offered by such sites. But the extant literature lacks documentation of a critically important step in this research logic: the extent to which young users actually take advantage of the opportunities to offered them. This study addresses this gap by presenting a theoretically driven investigation of specific participatory features in the youth civic Web and the quantity of user contributions they attract. Drawing from untested assumptions found in recent work, we test hypotheses concerning the impact on user activity of (a) citizenship orientations communicated by sites and (b) the organizational background of sites. We find that how sites communicate citizenship plays a significant role in determining the quantity of user participation, while the type of organization sponsoring a site makes little difference. We also document the existence of certain “superstar” sites that attract disproportionate amounts of user content. Directions for future research and methodological issues related to the coding of diverse activity on complex sites and challenges to causal inference are also discussed.

Keywords:

• Citizenship
• civic engagement
• civic learning
• content analysis
• social media

Notes

1. Some of these sites contained user-generated content of a type we did not search for, e.g., the ability to post audio files or create personal profiles.

2. Our rationale for excluding the external features here is that merely “friending” a civic organization or network requires significantly less thought and effort than posting a blog, starting a discussion thread, assembling a group, or suggesting a civic action, and that the two types of behaviors should therefore be kept separate. Further, since there were rarely any explicit indications that individual YouTube videos were user-produced, these were also omitted from the index.

3. The formula for this score is: A_c = A_b + A_g + A_f + A_u, where A_c is the total score, A_b is the activity score for blogs, A_g is the activity score for groups, A_f is the activity score for forums, and A_u is the activity score for user actions.

4. Since the purpose of the civic activity index was to eliminate spurious associations resulting from non-normal user content distributions, and the raw figures for the social networking services produced no significant associations whatsoever, it was deemed unnecessary to generate a separate social networking index.