ASSESSING THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON POLITICAL AWARENESS AND ENGAGEMENT IN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

ABSTRACT

This study was carried out to to examine the influence of social media on political awareness and engagement in university students, establishing a link between social media and politics and building a general understanding on the ways social media influence political awareness and engagement of university students some of which included; social media as an agent for political socialization and political participation. This study made use of the survey research design. The Instrument for the study was the Structures questionnaire which was validated by two lecturers from from the Department of Educational Management. The population of this study is the entire students of the University of Benin of about 39,243 undergraduate in it's fourteen faculties. Simple random sampling technique was used to select four faculties in the University of Benin and 3% of the final year students of each of the four faculties which was randomly selected,  resulting to the total of 118 students a the sample size. One hundred and eighteen questionnaires where distributed to the final year students of the randomly sampled faculties which are Agriculture, Education, Management Science and Life Science. The questionnaires where retrieved and data analysis was done based on the responses of the Respondents. The results of the data analysis established that there is a significant relationship between social media and politics, and that this relationship fosters ease in political processes like election campaigns which with the influence of social media has become easier to reach a very large audience without having to stay in the rain or under the sun before party manifestos are being communicated to the citizen. It also discussed the importance of social media to politics and how social media contributes to the rapid growth of politics. It is sacrosanct that the recommendations. In this study should be implemented in our schools (primary, secondary and tertiary) as social media ease research processes.