International Journal of Population Data Science (2023) 8:3:11
International Journal of
Population Data Science
Journal Website: www.ijpds.org
Measuring Internet Meme engagement and individual differences: a novel scale
and its correlates
Giovanni Schiazza1
1
Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham
Introduction & Background Relevance to Digital Footprints
With increasing interest and research being done on compu-
Internet Memes (IMs) are social, digital artefacts that act as
tational analysis of social media and its phenomena, there is
information vectors on social networking sites. Memetic schol-
a need for survey research to explore connections between IDs
arly literature has mainly focused on analysing IMs content
and user behaviour through using a mix of validated and novel
with mixed methods. However, little scholarly attention has
ad-hoc measures.
been devoted to exploring the relationships between IMs and
users through survey methodologies. User interaction with internet memes creates a data trail
that can be used to infer several individual determinants
Users engage with IMs in many ways, but scholarly liter- through machine learning techniques. However, further psy-
ature lacks studies on Individual Differences (ID) that might chological research is needed to assess and underpin the link-
make users more or less prone to engage with them. The re- ages between IDs and IM engagement before inferring IDs on
sults suggest that certain psychological factors may affect IM large datasets.
engagement.
Results
Objectives & Approach Bivariate correlations reveal that young age, extraversion, neu-
roticism, SNI, FOMO, BR and CB are positively associated
This study examines how individual determinants relate to gen- with internet meme engagement regardless of content. Fur-
eral and political internet meme engagement. An exploratory ther, t-tests of dependent correlations show that age, FOMO
survey design is employed on an online sample of 472 partici- and ideology differ significantly in their correlations between
pants. general vs political meme engagement.
Engagement with political IMs is slightly higher in people
To measure meme engagement, we develop a novel scale
with left-leaning ideology and lower levels of conscientiousness.
by asking participants how likely (1-7) they are to exhibit cer-
A positive attitude towards IMs correlates with a marginally
tain behaviours (liking, commenting, sharing on account, tag-
higher openness to experience and left ideology while strongly
ging or sending privately to someone) on general memes and
correlating with younger age.
politically-centred ones. The novel scales’ feasibility is tested,
achieving good internal reliability (α>0.7) and a good fit in Interestingly, traditional measures of cognitive style do not
confirmatory factor analysis. correlate with IM engagement, while lower education weakly
correlates with self-assessed IM familiarity. Only BR posi-
The survey included validated measures of Fear of Miss- tively correlates with IM engagement, suggesting that gulli-
ing Out (FOMO), Conspiracy Belief (CB), personality traits bility plays a role in engagement.
(Big-5), Bullshit Receptivity (BR), Critical Reflection Test In hierarchical regressions, thematic groupings predict dif-
(CRT) and an adaptation of Social Network Intensity (SNI). ferences in variance shares in IM engagement. More overall
All the measures employed achieved good internal consistency variance (+10%) is explained in the general IM engagement
(α>0.7). scale compared to political IM engagement; socio-demo and
The study thematically groups the measures related to IMs cognitive account for less variance in political IMs. In compar-
(engagement, familiarity and attitude), social media (FOMO, ison, personality accounts for slightly more variance in political
SNI), cognitive style (CRT, BR, CB), personality (Big-5) and IM engagement. This analysis further supports different rela-
socio-demographics (age, gender, education, ethnicity, nation- tional structures of IDs when looking at general vs political IM
ality, ideology). engagement.
https://doi.org/10.23889/ijpds.v8i3.2276
November 2023 © The Authors. Open Access under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)
International Journal of Population Data Science (2023) 8:3:11
Conclusions & Implications
Study results suggest a difference in the pattern of engagement
depending on the content of IMs and participants’ IDs.
This exploratory study shows early signs that IDs play a
role in IM engagement, opening avenues for further survey re-
search and identifying which specific IDs might be interesting
to investigate when performing this type of research.
This study’s findings help researchers and users better un-
derstand the heterogeneous world of IM topical engagement by
highlighting what IDs might make users more prone to engage
with these social, digital artefacts.
