Keywords: Social media, big data, sentiment analysis, and emerging technologies

This study explores the nature of the relationship between toward Facebook use and political participation of young female adults. Recent developments in electoral processes provided convincing evidence of the pertinence of Facebook as a weapon in the political arsenal of various political parties to attract indifferent voter groups such as youth, females, and minorities (Carlisle & Patton, 2013). Excessively popular among youth involved in learning the norms of political engagement, Facebook use offers a significant heuristic opportunity to explore its psychological effects and political implications. As the exploratory literature focused on the relationship between Facebook use and the political participation of general users, recent scholarship specifically concentrated on the “core” groups consisting of youth, which were previously “discussed in passing” in the academic literature (Xenos et al., 2014). The extant research focused on specific groups of users such as black users, new users, and university students (Zhang & Leung, 2014) to examine the effects of social networking; however, the female as a “core” group was offered paltry academic attention. This study seeks to address some of the limitations in the research by developing on a conceptual model articulating the relationship between the attitude toward Facebook use and the political participation and support among young females.
In this study, the conceptual model specified direct and indirect associations between attitude toward Facebook use, situational political involvement, political self-efficacy, political participation, and political support, and tested the hypotheses (Figure1 could not be pasted here):
Method
For this study, a web-based survey was used to collect data from female participants enrolled in a communication course at a large Southern public university in the United States. As many as 241 young females (aged 18-24) completed the survey.
Results
MPlus 7 was used to examine the fit of the hypothesized model. Using maximum likelihood as a method of estimation, the results indicated that the hypothesized model fitted the data very well. The goodness of fit statistics for the model (χ2 =0.24, df =1, p = 0.62; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.00; CFI = 1.00, TLI = 1.05; standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) = 0.00) designated the degree to which our hypothesized model fitted the data. The study found significant results and excepting a couple of hypotheses, all hypotheses were supported. The findings suggested that attitude toward Facebook use could promote tangible changes in political participation patterns, and the analysis indicated that various dimensions of political participation were directly or indirectly influenced by the attitude toward Facebook use.
References
Carlisle, J. E., & Patton, R. C. (2013). Is social media changing how we understand political engagement? An analysis of Facebook and the 2008 presidential election. Political Research Quarterly, 66(4), 883–895. doi:10.1177/1065912913482758
Xenos, M., & Moy, P. (2007). Direct and differential effects of the Internet on political and civic engagement. Journal of Communication, 57(4), 704-718.
Zhang, Y., & Leung, L. (2014). A review of social networking service (SNS) research in communication journals from 2006 to 2011. New