Can WeChat really foster young people's civic engagement? Unraveling an underlying mechanism from the social capital theoretical perspective
| Date | 27 January 2022 |
| Pages | 645-663 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-07-2021-0204 |
| Published date | 27 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
| Author | Hua Pang |
Can WeChat really foster young
people’s civic engagement?
Unraveling an underlying
mechanism from the social capital
theoretical perspective
Hua Pang
School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
Abstract
Purpose –Building upon social capital theoretical foundation, the principal purpose of present research is to
construct a conceptual research model and uncover the intricate relationships between WeChat usage, social
capital and civic participation behaviors among young people.
Design/methodology/approach –A large cross-sectional valid data from 1,238 young people in mainland
China were gathered to examine the hypothesized research model. Descriptive analyses, correlation analysis
and structural equation modeling (SEM) were sequentially undertaken to determine dynamic
interrelationships among main constructs.
Findings –The empirical findings demonstrate that WeChat usage positively impacts young people’s social
interaction ties, the guanxi network and shared goals. Moreover, social interaction ties and shared goals are
positively associated with their online civic engagement. Furthermore, the guanxi network is positively
associated with both online and offline civic engagement.
Research limitations/implications –Theoretically, this research is the first to explicitly explore the
influence mechanism of WeChat use intensity on different dimensions of individual-level social capital and
civic engagement. Practically, these obtained results can be beneficial to the comprehending of whether and
how WeChat is a resource for social capital and civic involvement.
Originality/value –Despite mobile social media, especially WeChat, has achieved immense popularity in
contemporary mainland China, the potential influence of this emerging technology use on individuals’
differential dimensions of social capital and civic engagement has not been systematically investigated. The
study may not only offer fresh insight into innovative features of WeChat but also contribute to broader
controversies regarding the impact of mobile-mediated communication on individuals’daily civic lives.
Keywords Mobile social media, WeChat, Social capital, Civic engagement, Young people
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In the past two decades, social networking sites (SNSs) have been recognized as web-based
services that provide individuals with more avenues than ever to contact with others, express
personal preferences and viewpoints, and engage in politics through respective networks
(Chen, 2014;de Z
u~
niga et al., 2017;Wen and Wei, 2018;You and Hon, 2019). With the
increased popularity of SNSs and penetration of mobile Internet in worldwide, the global
active mobile social media members have gained approximately 3.26 billion in January 2019
(Sun and Xu, 2019). Mobile social media consist of diverse services, such as Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter as well as blogs. One of the vital characteristics that differentiate mobile
SNSs from other patterns of computer-mediated interaction is that they permit individuals to
form and sustain a huge interpersonal ties (Wen and Wei, 2018;Yang and Men, 2020).
Additionally, mobile social media services encourage easy generation and transmission of
WeChat usage
among young
people
645
This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 19CXW035).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2050-3806.htm
Received 25 July 2021
Revised 29 November 2021
9 January 2022
Accepted 13 January 2022
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 75 No. 4, 2023
pp. 645-663
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-07-2021-0204
individualized and user-generated information (Pang, 2020;Wen and Wei, 2018;Zha et al.,
2020;Zhong, 2014). According to a recent statistical data from the China Internet Network
Information Center (CNNIC), WeChat has become one of the most dominate mobile SNSs in
mainland China and has currently achieved roughly one billion daily active users at the end of
2018 (CNNIC, 2019). Despite US-based social media services, such as Facebook, YouTube and
MySpace, are currently forbidden by the Chinese state, the widespread use of WeChat may
overcome specific censorships and facilitate civic participation by affording additional
manners for accessing various information, discussing political issues and joining in online
civic organizations (Chen, 2017b;Shao and Pan, 2019). Against such background, the
exponential growth of WeChat makes it significant to unpack the potential influences of
utilizing this newly emerging communication technology on younger population’s social
capital and civic engagement in contemporary new media contexts.
Social capital is an emerging th eoretical orientation that h as recently garnered
considerable interest and attention from digital media pundits and scholars (Ferrucci et al.,
2020;Ghahtarani et al., 2019;Wen and Wei, 2018). Previous studies illuminated that empirical
investigations on supportive capital had appeared two distinct academic traditions (Warren
et al., 2015;Zhong, 2014). Specifically, one stream of research highlights the role of social
capital for individual participants, and the concept could be comprehended as the actual and
potential resources embedded in people’s stronger-tie and weaker-tie networks (You and Hon,
2019). Comparatively, another study tradition mainly focuses on the importance of social
capital for collective goals and normally indicates individuals’involvement in civic life,
orientation toward politics and engagement in local communities (Pang, 2018a;Park and You,
2019;Yavetz and Aharony, 2021). Building upon this foundational insight, the
conceptualization of social capital has been differentiated into three categories: structural
capital, relational capital and cognitive capital (Shao and Pan, 2019). Research has confirmed
that SNSs could transform the structure and essence of social relationship and thereby that
they might alter the distribution and multifaceted character of social capital (de Z
u~
niga et al.,
2017). Additionally, individual-level social capital, such as social communication bonds,
mutual trustiness and common goals and vision, seems to exert significant influence on civic
involvement and participation behavior in the Western democratic countries.
Despite existing research offers a theoretical foundation to comprehend individuals’civic
involvement behaviors within the mobile SNSs (Kruikemeier et al., 2013;Loader et al., 2014;
Pang, 2018c), relatively few works have concentrated on the important antecedents of civic
engagement from the perspective of social capital theory. Moreover, though the main impacts
of social media use on social capital have been investigated (Ferrucci et al., 2020;Park and
You, 2019;Sun and Xu, 2019), little research has uncovered the intersection of WeChat use
and other new technologies, such as the rapidly developing mobile technologies. Thus, the
stream of research still needs to be further probed due to the chance that WeChat presents for
enhancing civic involvement behavior because of its large user base. Furthermore, due to the
advent of mobile SNSs, particularly WeChat, a number of civic and political involvement
modes among younger generations have appeared, such as online political involvement and
voting; organizing strategies of political actions, such as volunteering and persuading on
public events; and handing of the crisis (Boulianne and Theocharis, 2018;Jennings et al.,
2020). Considering that younger generation is deemed as the future of every nation (Chen,
2017b;Loader et al., 2014), the mechanisms of indigenous mobile social media use on youth
civic engagement deserve more explicit attention in mainland China.
Drawing upon social capital theory (Chiu et al., 2006;de Z
u~
niga et al., 2017;Valenzuela
et al., 2009), the study proposes a conceptual research model. As illustrated by Figure 1, this
paper strives to address the aforementioned gaps by systematically unearthing how Chinese
young people’s interactive communication on WeChat could influence their distinct aspects
of social capital and individuals’guanxi network and simultaneously exploring the impact of
AJIM
75,4
646
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