Beyond the online/offline divide: How youth's online and offline civic activities converge

Abstract

In this article, the authors investigate whether and how young people combine online and offline civic activities in modes of participation. The authors discuss four participation modes in which online and offline activities may converge: Politics, Activism, Consumption, and Sharing. Applying confirmatory factor analysis to survey data about the civic participation among Dutch youth (aged 15-25 years; N = 808), the authors find that online and offline activities are combined in the Politics, Activism, and Sharing modes, and that these three modes correlate significantly with each other. Conversely, the Consumption mode can only be validated as a separate offline participation mode. The results confirm the conclusion of previous studies that youth's participation patterns are relatively dependent of mode, and add that their participation is concurrently relatively independent of place (offline vs. online). © SAGE Publications 2011.