Media consumption and practices in higher education : An exploratory study with social communication students

Abstract

This article presents partial results of the project "Media Literacy in Higher Education: an exploratory study with Social Communication students", whose main objective is to assess the degree of literacy of students in this area of training over the three years of their academic career in the Social Communication course, taught at the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu. To achieve the objectives, a descriptive and exploratory study was developed and an online questionnaire was used for data collection. Specifically in this article, we analyze the results related to the first section of the questionnaire and related to student’s media consumption and practices. The results obtained allow us to conclude that students essentially use social media and television to keep themselves informed about what happens in the country and in the world, with the printed newspaper being the least used medium. In terms of the use of devices and technologies, most students consider that the main functions of the internet are to inform and entertain, they mostly use the smartphone to establish and maintain contacts, and the main function of social networks is entertainment. The relevance and main contribution of this study is, among others, to allow the characterization of habits and practices of media consumption, as well as to enable the identification of specific strategies for a generation that clearly has different habits of information consumption.