Media usage patterns, beliefs, and practices among kenyan youth in Uasin Gishu County

Abstract

This article examines media usage patterns, beliefs, and practices among youth aged 18-24 in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya, addressing the research question: What are the media usage patterns, beliefs, and practices among Kenyan youth in Uasin Gishu County? Based on the outcomes of a qualitative descriptive design where 28 purposefully selected respondents (14 from an urban setting and 14 from rural areas), as well as 25 policy documents were analyzed, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews involving media elicitation methods. The results show that WhatsApp is the most widely used medium for gathering information, the relevance of radio to the life of people in rural areas and hierarchy of trust in certain media shaping information consumption. Media practices among youth are described by passive reception, heuristic criteria used to assess credibility and considerable differences between urban and rural youth. With Potter's Cognitive Theory of Media Literacy, the findings show the presence of underdeveloped knowledge structures necessary for critical media usage. The term "family bubble" implies that relationships come first and the youth do not dare to criticize their parents and close friends concerning disinformation distribution. However, there are clear gaps between policy and practice, as policy documents tend to focus more on urban digital spaces while ignoring rural radio spaces and the social aspects of media use. Some of the recommendations for this problem are to include radio in Media and Information Literacy (MIL) policies, solve infrastructure issues by providing zero-rated websites for fact-checking, adopt platform-specific strategies, utilize peer networks in MIL initiatives, and combine civic education and MIL. This paper provides empirical evidence about youth media behaviors in Uasin Gishu County and highlights the significance of socially situated MIL approaches.