Affiliations: [a] School of Communication and Information, Rutgers
University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA | [b] College of Information Sciences and Technology,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA | Fundacion Universidad de las Americas Puebla, Business
School, anta Catarina Martir, San Andres Cholula, Puebla, Mexico | City University of New York, Staten Island, NY, USA
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Frank Bridges, Rutgers University, School
of Communication and Information, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901,
USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: Recent initiatives by the United States government are seeking to
enhance the transparency and openness of its decision finding processes. At the
same time, increased use of interactive web and social media technologies as
well as the integration with online social networking platforms suggests that
citizens have unprecedented access to government representatives. In this
paper, we report results from an exploratory usability study involving average
young adults in an engagement task. More precisely, we observed college
students while they searched for appropriate online contact points with the
federal government to communicate concerns related to various problem domains.
We report a mixture of quantitative and qualitative results including an
analysis of post-study interviews with the participants. Less than 30% of our
subjects were able to accomplish the objective of the given task scenarios. We
find that a combination of individual and institutional factors limit
participants. In addition, we do not observe a significant utilization of cues
related to online social networking tools. We attribute this finding to a still
limited acceptance of such communication tools for political participation by
average young adults.
Keywords: Political participation, college students, online interaction, experiment, impact of social networks
