A Study on Awareness, Exposure and Attitude towards Digital Citizenship among University Students in Malaysia

Abstract

Digital citizenship has received considerable huge attention from numerous researchers in recent years. Due to the tremendous work put forth by the scholars, the researchers aimed to explore in-depth the relationship between students’ aptitude towards digital citizenship in the Malaysian educational context. This survey gathered 256 responses from 17 public universities from the central region, north region, south region, and the east region as well as East Malaysia. Three independent variables namely students’ awareness, students’ exposure, and students’ attitude and their relationships with digital citizenship (digital security, digital etiquette, and digital rights and responsibilities) as dependent variables were examined. This study relied on Partial Least Square Modeling (PLS-SEM) to probe the relationship between the IV and DV. A higher-order construct was studied with a focus on the reflective model. The internal consistency, factor loading, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the constructs with their indicators were all tested using the measurement model. The structural model was applied to measure the relationship between the constructs. This research reported that there was a substantial relationship between students' awareness, exposure, and attitude toward digital citizenship. In conclusion, public university students in Malaysia were well informed, exposed, and had a meticulous attitude towards digital citizenship; however, proper training and well guidelines have to be emphasized in a certain area, especially from the spectrum of digital security. Further study is encouraged, and further recommendations were also discussed in this paper.