Development And Application Of Internet Political Efficacy Questionnaire For College Students

Internet political efficacy is the result of the deepening of political efficacy reserch.In order to investigate the internet political efficacy, this study consider college students as an object. Through the study on development of internet political efficacy questionnaire, to inspect the meaning and structure of internet political efficay, and provide measuring tool for internet political efficacy research.The author develop the original questionnaire based on the related literatures, and combined with some methods like structured interview, opened questionnaire survey, and so on. Then used the original questionnaire to measure our college students, we chose the items through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, we get the formal questionnaire included 18 items. Of course we verified the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. Then we discussed the present situation about internet political efficacy of college students, the difference on demographic variables, and the relation between internet political efficacy and internet political engagement. The results are listed as follow:(1) Internet political efficacy questionnaire for college students contains four dimmensions:information efficacy, collective efficacy, external efficacy, internal efficacy.(2)The questionnaire which we had developed has good reliability and validity, which means that this questionnaire can be used to measure the college students’internet political efficacy.(3) Through the survey of internet political efficacy of college students in different universities, it is found that the overall level of internet political efficacy of college students in our country is medium. Internet political efficacy is closely related to the age of internet use. In addition, external efficacy has significant difference in gender and internal efficacy has significant diference in major. But internet political efficacy has no significant difference on demographic variables, such as grade, political status, native place.(4) The internet political efficacy has a significant positive correlation with internet political engagement for college students, has predictive effect toward internet political engagement of college students.