Explaining correlation between being a facebook user and political participation

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Professor of Communication

2 MA graduate, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Tehran

Abstract

Abstract: the objective of this paper is to measure and explain the relationship between Facebook users’ social capital and their political participation in real world. Following political changes in the world and in the middle east, there are growing interest among researchers to work on political participation and facebook usage. We therefore developed this interest into this research paper in which we try to investigate the nature of relationship between social capital of the facebook users and their political participation. In order to explain such relationship, theoretically, we used a synthesis of Potnam’s theory of Social capital and Michael Rush’s theory of political participation. At the methodological level, we chose facebook users as the unit of analysis and chose Iranian students as potential unit of observation. An online survey strategy was employed to gather data. In the end and based on sampling formula some 674 samples were chosen to be observed. Some of the findings indicate that indice such as closeness or openness of friends’ social networks, network density, closeness or openness of groups’ social networks, conditions of accessibility constitute four major important indice of social capital that determine political participatio0n of the users.
keywords: political participation, social capital, virtual social networks, facebook

Keywords

References

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Quarterly of Social Studies and Research in Iran
Volume 4, Issue 4 - Serial Number 4
January 2016
Pages 615-635

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