Can social network sites facilitatecivic engagement? Assessing
dynamic relationship betweensocial media and civic activities
among young people
Hua Pang
School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
Kaiyang Qin
Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and
Min Ji
Institute of Political Science, University of M€unster, M€unster, Germany
Abstract
Purpose– The primary goal of this article is to review the existing studies and offer clarity regarding theassociation between social media adoption and youth civic engagement.
Design/methodology/approach– This research systematically summarizes and reviews 42 original articlespublished from 2010 to 2019 with an objective of offering insightful results. Additionally, a theoreticalframework was carefully designed by adopting various conceptions from citizen participation and computermediatedcommunication research literature.
Findings– The findings demonstrate that social media usage could generally have a positive correlation withcivic participation among younger generations. Moreover, the result also highlights that certain functionalfeatures of social media uses including using social media for news consumption and expression couldsignificantly predict civic engagement.
Originality/value– Despite the ever-growing importance of social media technologies, investigations on theirdifferential, nonlinear and even inconsistent effects on civic engagement remain theoretically ambiguous andempirically unsubstantiated. The study represents one of the first scholarly attempts to review, summarize andanalyze the extant research evidence from the past ten years.
KeywordsCivic engagement, Social media, Young people, Social network sites, Literature review
Paper typeResearch paper
（政治与公共管理学院李广宇）
