ATTITUDES OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE TOWARDS THE TRADITIONAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

The aim of this field work based research is to study the attitudes of college students, living in the northeastern region of Japan far from the big cities, towards the traditional media - which hereafter means TV, radio, magazines, and the like - and social media - also referred to as networking service and SNS - contents. To accomplish this purpose, a survey study was carried out in a typical countryside city located relatively far from big cities. The survey was not only specifically targeted at female students aged 18-20, but also composed by two experiments done on two different occasions, in 2016 and 2017, with the data collected from two different samples of respondents. In the first experiment, we assessed the level of importance and credibility that the respondents feel towards both - the conventional and social media, whereas in the second experiment, which is an extended version of the former, we investigated the roles that these media play in the students’ consuming behavior in regard particularly to the entertainment, fashion and lifestyle articles and contents marketed on them, and their interplay in this process. The collected data set, which comprised 154 valid answersheets for the first experiment and 153 for the second, was statistically processed using factor analysis and structural equations modeling in order to build a quantitative model that allowed us to study the regional college students’ attitudes. The first experiment yielded a model with factors emphasizing aspects concerning the importance, security and reliability of the contents, whereas the second study provided a statistical model showing the triggering factors that attract the attention of the students and some of the conditions that may lead to the actual buying or consuming behavior. Finally, the findings here help understand how young people living in the countryside are accessing and narrowing down the huge amount of media contents available today, and conversely how they are influenced by them. Thus, the results may be of some use in the realm of information design and related fields.