A Study Of The Ethical Cognition Of Tertiary Education Students In Social Media

Due to the wide-spread usage of social media,such as WeChat,Weibo and QQ,researchers in China have gradually started to study communication ethics from the perspective of social media.Until now,there exists a number of researches which studied the ethical issues in internet communications or social media users’ behaviours.Nevertheless,few of them are focusing on the users’ cognition about communication ethics.As a highly-interactive-and-involving type of media,social media’s user behaviours are impacted by the variety of user groups and the complexity of communicating environments.However,it should be admitted that individual’s understanding and attitude could affect their communicating behaviours as well.This research is a qualitative research.It is based on the theory of network communication ethics,and questionnaires were used to complete the surveys.The tertiary school students were chosen as respondents,as most of them are actively participating in social media communications.Seven areas of respondents’ cognition were examined: information ethics,ethics of intellectual properties,properties of personal rights,language usage ethics,interpersonal ethics,safety ethics and ethical responsibilities.The purpose of this research is to analyse the overall result of the survey and to investigate the different outcomes among user groups,therefore provide references for future studies of communication ethics.Also,it may offer guidances for university students who are social media users,as well as educators in communication ethics area.In this survey,736 students from 14 tertiary education institutions of Chongqing were selected as samples.With questionnaires,samples’ attitudes towards the communication ethics and deviated behaviours were examined.The Part I of the research is the introduction.What is included in this part will be the theoretical base of the whole research.It will firstly introduce the background of the research and some main literatures in this field.Therefore,it will conclude the present research status.The scope and contents of communication ethics cognition studies will also be summarised.Part II will briefly present the processes of the survey,including sample selecting,questionnaire distributing,and questionnaire’s reliability testing.In Part III,the outcome of the survey will be analysed.Through the analysation,it is possible to gain a holistic view of contemporary university student’s understanding about communication ethics,and to make comparisons among the results of different user groups.Part IV is the conclusion,in which an overall reflection will also be made.