Understanding University Students' Thoughts and Practices about Digital Citizenship: A Mixed Methods Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate university students' thoughts and practices concerning digital citizenship. An explanatory mixed methods design was used, and it involved collecting qualitative data after a quantitative phase in order to follow up on the quantitative data in more depth. In the first quantitative phase of the study, a digital citizenship survey, including demographics and 5-point Likert scale questions, was conducted with 435 students of a private university. Factor analysis, descriptive statistics, and parametric test were used to analyze the data gathered by the survey. One of the important findings in the first phase was that university students do not prefer to engage in political activities online. The second qualitative phase was conducted to better understand the reasons behind university students' thoughts and practices regarding digital citizenship. In this exploratory follow up, the data gathered in the first phase was tentatively explored with 10 students studying at the same university. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students and content analysis was used to analyze the data. Based on the findings, students indicated that they do not prefer to engage in political activities online because of emotional disturbance, pressure from society, and a fear of affecting their future lives in a negative way.