Does Education Background Affect Digital Equal Opportunity and the Political Participation of Sustainable Digital Citizens? A Taiwan Case

Chia-Hui Chen,Ming-Lun Chung,Chao-Lung Liu,Bryant Pui Hung Hui

doi:10.3390/su12041359

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the level of digital equity and political participation in Taiwan. In this study, we argue that high digital literacy and active civic participation facilitate the formation of sustainable digital citizenship. We review the development of digital education policy in Taiwan since the 1990s. Based on the nationwide survey dataset prepared by Taiwan’s National Development Council in 2018, we examine the relations between digital literacy, digital social life, the digitalized acquisition of government information, and the political participation of digital citizens. We adopt a structural equation modeling approach and perform the multi-group analysis to validate our proposed model of digital equal opportunity. The results show that there are significantly positive relations between the four digital latent variables, but no statistically significant differences between interviewees with high and low education backgrounds in the relations with these variables. In addition, our findings reveal that the digital social life of digital citizens indirectly affects their political participation through their digitalized acquisition of government information. This paper also discusses the implications of digital education policy and the formation of sustainable digital citizenship.

Highlights

For the past twenty years, there has been a renewed interest in digital adoption
We argued the correlations between digital literacy (DL), digital social life (DSL), the digitalized acquisition of government information (AGI), and the political participation of digital citizens (DC)
We adopted Bollen–Stine bootstrapping procedures to evaluate the hypothesized relations among digital literacy (DL), digital social life (DSL), the digitalized acquisition of government information (AGI), and political participation of digital citizens (DC)

Summary

Introduction

For the past twenty years, there has been a renewed interest in digital adoption. Recent trends in ‘digital divided’ have led to a proliferation of studies that reminds government authorities to pay close attention to the invisible gap between urban and rural areas. In the field of education, in particular, government authorities have promoted digital literacy and digital pedagogy, thereby incorporating information and communication technology (ICT) and digital use into teaching and learning. In response to the growing trend of digitalization, the Taiwanese government has advocated the notion of digital opportunity when formulating digital policy. It has conducted a series of annual digital opportunity surveys since 2011. To test the robustness of the proposed model, we focused on interviewees with higher and lower education backgrounds in the multi-group analysis. We compared their relationships with latent variables and the structural paths of digital opportunity

Objectives

Results

Conclusion