Meta-Cognition of Efficacy and Social Media Usage among Japanese Civil Society Organizations
1
Graduate school of humanities and social sciences, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan
2
Faculty of humanities and social sciences, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan
3
Department of political science, Tokai University, Tokyo 151-8677, Japan
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Information 2020, 11(2), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/info11020118
Received: 10 January 2020 / Revised: 19 February 2020 / Accepted: 19 February 2020 / Published: 21 February 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Citizenship and Participation 2018)
This paper examines how social media are affecting Japanese civil society organizations, in relation to efficacy and political participation. Using data from the 2017 Japan Interest Group Study survey, we analyzed how the flow of information leads to the political participation of civil society organizations. The total number of respondents (organizations) were 1285 (942 organizations in Tokyo and 343 from Ibaraki). In the analysis of our survey we focused on the data portion related to information behavior and efficacy and investigated the meta-cognition of efficacy in lobbying among civil society organizations in Tokyo and Ibaraki. We found that organizations that use social media were relatively few. However, among the few organizations that use social media, we found that these organizations have a much higher meta-cognition of political efficacy in comparison to those that do not use social media. For instance, social media usage had a higher tendency of having cognition of being able to exert influence upon others. We also found that organizations that interact with citizens have a higher tendency to use social media. The correspondence analysis results point towards a hypothesis of how efficacy and participation are mutually higher among the organizations that use social media in Japan.
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Keywords:
social media; political efficacy; civil society organizations; JIGS; interest groups; Japan
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MDPI and ACS Style
Sagara, T.; Kaigo, M.; Tsujinaka, Y. Meta-Cognition of Efficacy and Social Media Usage among Japanese Civil Society Organizations. Information 2020, 11, 118.
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