Constructing Online Political Habitus: Unpacking Filipino Generational Political Facebook Posts Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis
- April 26, 2022
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: IJRISS, Psychology
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue IV, April 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186
Jason O. Manaois, PhD
Psychology Department, Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan, Philippines
Abstract – Social networking sites had become influential as a platform for discourses, social interaction, and self-presentation (Delise, 2014). Facebook (FB) had become mainstream that its feature of posting political posts and information impacts the society. It is the objective of this study to explore the nature of online political posts and its users. A purposively sampled participants were selected (n=200), and their online political posts were coded and analyzed. Using exploratory sequential mixed methods, six major motivations to use social media was identified thru content analysis. Multiple correspondence analysis was done to cluster individuals into defined groups, namely: political activism, political slacktivism, and politically enmeshed. Moreover, the structure of online political habitus was constructed. It is cognitively structured by the individual level of political knowledge and socially constructed by political participation. Implications of the result show the crucial role of values formation during the early formative years in a person’s life. The established beliefs and values later dictate a person’s online political engagements. Moreover, educational attainment also contributed to the development of online political habitus of individuals wherein they are instinctively motivated to do political posting.
Keywords – Facebook, social media research, online, political habitus, multiple correspondence analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
In today’s digital age, Internet access has become increasingly affordable. This led most people to be connected online using mobile phones and other portable electronic devices (Davidson, 2015). With the rise of Facebook as the most widely used social network site with more than two billion active users (Chaykowski, 2017), it created substantive impact on the political and social life of people around the world (Chan, 2016). Its featured functions facilitated users to network and socially interact, exchange information, platform for discourses, self-expression, and mobilization of different political activities. Facebook has become a common medium for socialization wherein much of people social life now exist online (Chan, 2016; Dalsgaard, 2016; Delise, 2014).
