Citizen journalism and democracy: How user-generated news use relates to political knowledge and participation

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 87, Issue 3-4, 2010, Pages 515-529

  Kaufhold, Kelly ^a   Valenzuela, Sebastian ^a   De Zúñiga, Homero Gil ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CITIZENSHIP; DEMOCRACY; INTERNET; KNOWLEDGE; MASS MEDIA; MEDIA ROLE; NATIONAL POLITICS; POLITICAL RELATIONS;

EID: 78651440123     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769901008700305     Document Type: Article

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71. We conducted a comparison between the two items that were most comparable across offline /online participation in terms of wording and activities involved: contacting media organizations and contacting elected officials. We created dichotomous dummy variables for the online version of these items: all responses between 1 and 9 were recoded as 1, while those who responded 0 were left intact. Comparison of Online Participation Scales, Original and Dummy-coded Offline Online Contacting Contacting News Org. (0 /1) a Politician (0 /1) Contacting News Org. (0/9) .53 - Contacting News Org. (0/1) .53 - Contacting a Politician (0/9) -.24 Contacting a Politician (0/1) -.22 All correlations are significant at p < .01.
72. Please note: while professional news consumption correlated significantly with offline participation but not with online participation at p < .05, the distinctions are small. In fact, the marginal significance of offline participation is likely due to our large sample size, N = 958, which enabled the elucidation of even small effects.
73. High and low trust were crafted using the pick-a-point procedure described by Hayes and Matthes: Andrew F. Hayes and Jörg Matthes, "Computational Procedures for Probing Interactions in OLS and Logistic Regression: SPSS and SAS Implementations," Behavior Research Methods 41 (August 2009): 924-36. This procedure holds all other variables constant at their means, so that the estimated values of the dependent variables apply to "average" individuals who differ only in news use and news trust.
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