Media Use and Political Behavior of Tehran University Students

The main goal of this paper is to study the effect of media use especially the Internet on political behavior of Tehran University students. To this end, the effect of Internet use is investigated not only by considering the amount of access, the utilized online sources for the news-seeking, etc., but also through the effects of environmental and cognitive elements.
Population of this study is composed of students from Tehran University divided into 4 groups of Humanities, the Arts, Engineering, and Sciences. Data was collected using the survey method through conducting 295 structured, face-to-face interviews.
Findings show that the Internet is used more frequently than other media for tracking political news, with nearly 90 percent of respondents indicating that they use the Internet for the purpose of finding political news. Participation in the demonstrations among non-traditional political behaviors, and voting in elections among traditional political behaviors are more common among the students than the other political activities. The results of structural equation modeling show that the effect of media news exposure on political behavior is through the intermediate variable of political efficacy.