Article
Political Memes as Digital Political Communication: A Structural Equation Model of Exposure, Engagement, Perceived Influence, and Political Perception Among College Youth
Political memes have become a pervasive vehicle of informal political communication among youth on social media, yet the psychometric and structural relationships among exposure, engagement, perceived influence, political perception, and critical media literacy remain under-specified in the empirical literature. This paper reports a complete, reproducible statistical pipeline descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, normality testing, correlation analysis, multiple-comparison-corrected group tests, multiple regression, and structural equation modeling (SEM) applied to a 360-record, 30-item Likert questionnaire organized around five theorized constructs: Political Meme Exposure, Meme Engagement, Perceived Influence, Political Perception, and Critical/Media Literacy. the study is presented as a methodological and instrument-validation exercise empirical finding about real students. Reliability coefficients for the five subscales ranged from acceptable to good (Cronbach's alpha = 0.67–0.82). A five-factor measurement model combined with a hypothesized structural model (Exposure → Engagement → Influence → Perception, with direct Exposure → Perception and Literacy → Perception paths) achieved a good fit to the pilot data (CFI = .973, TLI = .971, RMSEA = .021), and Exposure showed the strongest standardized structural effect on Perception (β = .52, p < .001), followed by Influence (β = .31, p < .001). We describe in full the stratified-sampling framework, pre-processing rules, and analytic code needed to reproduce every statistic and figure, so that the pipeline can be applied unchanged to genuine field data once collected. Implications for questionnaire refinement, sampling strategy, and future confirmatory research on meme-mediated political socialization are discussed.