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Effects of the Size and Diversity of Personal Networks on Civic Engagement

Singapore.
The final presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is Homero Gil de Zúñiga, whose interest is in civic engagement. How is this related to interpersonal and computer-mediated networks, and how does this play out differently for weak and strong ties in the networks? Is the effect of interpersonal and computer-mediated networks mediated by access to weak ties? Which setting is more predictive of civic engagement?

Past research in this area has shown connections between demographics and civic engagement; social orientations and civic engagement; and media use and civic engagement; the presence of citizen communication networks also has a positive effect. Finally, there are differences between strong and weak ties: being exposed to a wider range of connections through weak ties can variously have positive and negative effects - providing a greater diversity of information that may spark civic action, for example.

Homero's work explored a number of hypotheses around this, then - whether larger (personal and/or online) networks led to greater participation, whether weak-tie networks led to greater participation, whether weak ties mediated the relationship between networks and civic participation; and whether the role of weak ties would be stronger for online than for interpersonal (i.e. offline) networks. This was explored through a national survey of some 1,400 respondents in the US.

The results showed (ugh - inasmuch as tables of r-squared values in a conference presentation ever show anything) that weak ties discussion is the strongest predictor of civic engagement - discussion with a diverse group is a strong predictor of engagement. Offline and online networks both predict weak ties; only online networks also predict strong ties - so that having larger networks both on- and offline ended up also leading to greater civic participation.

Network size predicts engagement, then - the more people you talk to, the more likely are you to participate in civic action. Weak ties are the strongest predictor of engagement, though - so the diversity and heterogeneity of the community that the presence of weak ties tends to point to is likely to be more important than simply being part of a large network. Weak tie networks mediates the association between the size of one's networks and the level of one's participation in civic engagement, in other words - and most importantly, being connected through online networks leads to a greater exposure to weak-tie networks than do offline networks.

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