Abstract
People use diverse sources of information to obtain political information. We apply uses and gratifications theory (UGT) to illustrate how the use of different political information sources influences perceptions of information satisfaction related to the Tunisian elections of 2014. An online survey of 175 university students in Tunisia, with a 58% response rate. We use partial least squares structural equation modelling to test our research model of hypotheses relating content, process, and social gratifications to information satisfaction. We find that content, process, and social gratifications constructs combine to explain 41% of the variance in information satisfaction. Content gratification has the strongest influence (p=.505) followed by similar levels of influence of process (p=.163) and social (p=.140) gratifications. Social gratifications are partially mediated by process gratification. Limitations of our study include our online survey method and our sample of university students. However, our respondents experienced the uprising, the election campaigns, and voted in the elections, suggesting their perceptions are valid, if not generalisable to all of Tunisia. Practically our study suggests that individuals searching for political information should 1) determine how they’ll know information is accurate, 2) maximize the number of different activities for information-seeking rather than focusing on the frequency of a few activities, and 3) know that information sharing contributes to information satisfaction. The dominance of content gratifications, i.e., information reliability and accuracy, is important for information providers, such as, government and political leaders. Our study provides evidence that UGT is useful in the novel context of emerging political situations.
Highlights
The popular uprisings that brought down the authoritarian government in Tunisia in 2011 resulted in a new constitution and elections in 2014
Using partial least squares based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), we show that the expectations for significant positive influences of traditional Uses and gratifications theory (UGT) constructs of content, process, and social gratifications hold in our context of difficult elections, explaining a substantial amount of variance in our information satisfaction construct (R2 = .41) and having significant positive influences on information satisfaction
We evaluated the structural models for effects on information satisfaction using the coefficient of determination (R2) values and in terms of the significance and relative values of the path coefficients (Kishore and McLean 2007) (Gefen, Straub et al 2000)
Summary
The popular uprisings that brought down the authoritarian government in Tunisia in 2011 resulted in a new constitution and elections in 2014. Considered free and fair, these elections were historic as they replaced a regime in place since 1987 and posited a democratic future for Tunisia. Many different groups attempted to influence citizens’ perceptions through various information and communication technologies. Information and communication technology (ICT) includes television, radio, newspapers and magazines, telephone networks (including cell systems), and the Internet, including social media. In this study we focus on using services from the Internet, cell phone communications, and traditional media sources, e.g., TV, newspapers and face-to-face (F2F) communication. We examine the use of these information sources by an opportunity sample of young Tunisians during the Tunisian elections of 2014
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