EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTERGENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES, POLITICAL IDENTITY, AND MEDIA PERCEPTIONS

Abstract

What contributes to the formation of a person’s political identity and how does this process of identity formation then influence media assessment? This dissertation set out to explore this question. Particularly, it hypothesized that generational belonging, as defined by the critical years hypothesis, will impact the two dimensions of a person’s political identity: a) salience, operationalized as the ascribed importance to politics and a person’s interest in public affairs and policies; and b) status, operationalized as a person’s confidence and commitment to certain political issues and ideologies (H1). The dissertation then hypothesizes that people with a stronger political identity will more likely perceive news as hostile, in comparison to those with a weaker political identity (H2). And finally, people with stronger perception of media hostility will be more likely to perceive news as less credible, than those who perceive the media as less hostile (H3). In addition to the proposed hypotheses, this dissertation also attempted to examine if generational belonging has any direct effects on media perceptions of hostility (RQ1) and media use (RQ2). To test the proposed hypotheses and research questions, this dissertation employed an explanatory mixed methods sequential design. Data from a quantitative survey questionnaire were collected first and were then used to inform the semi-structured interviews, which addressed some of the survey results (Edmonds & Kennedy, 2017). The survey questionnaire first measured the impact of intergenerational differences on different generations’ understanding of Lebanese politics and how this difference in understanding politics can potentially promote differences in political identity development. Lebanese participants living in Lebanon were recruited using a random representative sample. A sample of 300 participants was recruited to ensure a margin of error of ±5.6% at a 95% confidence level, based on the Lebanese population (~6 million). The collected data was then analyzed using structural equation modeling. Two types of model fit estimation techniques were used: Maximum Likelihood Estimation, and the Bayesian Estimation Technique. Results indicated that generational belonging predicts the salience dimension of political identity within the structural model. The effect on status was not significant, despite the fact that the two dimensions (status and salience) are very much correlated under their higher order variable. These findings stress the importance of positioning any future examination of generational belonging within the broader present and historical reality of the context under study. A country’s political system (in Lebanon’s case, the consociationalist democracy) can moderate the impact of generational belonging on political maturation. Moreover, the proposed structural equation model found that the two dimensions of political identity have different effects on perceptions of hostility: Participants whose political identity was more salient, i.e., those who ascribed more importance to politics and reported higher interest in public affairs and policies, were more likely to perceive news as hostile. However, when it came to status, i.e. confidence and commitment to certain political issues and ideologies, participants who were more confident in their knowledge, were overall less likely to perceive news as hostile. The following question was therefore posed: Does political efficacy reduce media skepticism? Semi-structured interviews were then conducted with 15 participants to probe whether political efficacy reduces media skepticism. Results indicated that political efficacy might lower levels of media skepticism through perceptions of 1) superiority and 2) third-person effects. When it comes to perceived superiority, the results support previous work that has shown that overconfidence in media judgement results in lowering people’s abilities to discern real news from fake news and mis/dis-information. It also expands and adds to these findings by accounting for the role of political overconfidence in not only limiting people’s ability to discern fake news from real news, but to also judge the credibility and hostility of the news. The third-person effect is the second mechanism through which political efficacy can lower levels of media skepticism. The perception that political news content influences others more than themselves (Davison, 1983), along with their overconfidence in their political awareness, resulted in a simplistic approach to viewing politics and the media. Moreover, the semi-structured interviews found differences in how individuals understand and differentiate credibility and hostility in political news coverage. Results indicated that credibility is generally perceived as a function of source (channel/outlet), content (specific news stories), and personal leanings. Most importantly, results indicated that news audiences rely on affect heuristics to assess credibility. Hostility, for the most part, is perceived as a function of balance in news coverage. Interviewed participants considered that the hostility and credibility can co-exist: bias is an unavoidable reality, and accordingly, a given in the news. Credibility, on the other hand, is a choice: a decision to report the “truth” or the effort to do so. Overall, the significance of this dissertation lies in offering a novel framework for understanding the interdependent relationship between identity and media perception. By examining political identity as multidimensional construct and accounting for the influence of generational belonging on identity formation, this dissertation offered a deeper and more nuanced understanding of when and how perceptions of hostility and credibility come to be. It also allowed for uncovering the two mechanisms through which political efficacy can reduce media skepticism.