(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication Osaka, Japan
explain the orientations towards online political participation. The study concludes that the
online political world is indeed a natural extension of the offline world (Calenda and Meijer,
2007).
Syed Arabi and Khaizuran (2010) explored the role of blogs and democracy in
relation to a by-election in Malaysia. The study suggests that blogs cannot operate in isolation.
The constituency for the by-election was Malay dominated but half the blogs were in English
and the issues raised were above the immediate concerns of the voters. Voters who were
likely to be low educated and from the low income group did not relate to blog posts. Blogs
open the space for interested citizens to have their say on the current local political scene yet
they may not be particular engaging voters or directly campaigning for the election. The
study illustrates voters may not share the same views as bloggers as the ruling party (BN)
won the by-election despite the bloggers strong support for the opposition party.
Methodology
The study involved a survey consisting structured questionnaire with regards to respondents’
background and usage of / exposure to new media, new media and politics and new media
and democracy. The new media and politics part contained 16 statements on a five-point
Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree) while the new media and democracy section
had 13 statements also on a five-point Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree). The
study had 253 respondents comprising young ethnic Chinese aged 20 to 24. The Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse the data collected. The results
were interpreted using factor analysis and regression in order to obtain insights into the data
collected over a period of two-weeks.
Findings and Results
The Cronbach alpha for new media and politics and new media and democracy were 0.798
and 0.852 respectively. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.810
for the former and 0.817 for the latter. Of the 253 respondents 69.2% were females and
30.8% males.
Data Reduction: New Media and Politics
A factor analysis was conducted to reduce the large number of variables to a smaller number
of factors. For the new media and politics, 16 variables were entered into a factor analysis of
principal components using the promax rotation and suppressed at 0.4. The results of the
pattern matrix can be seen in Table 1.
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