La competencia mediática de jóvenes de la ciudad de La Paz (Bolivia)dimensiones para la interacción con los medios audiovisuales masivos y digitales

Abstract

In Bolivia, there has not been researched, studied, theorized and formulated projects in the framework of education and media literacy. It is a lack and very important social need. In this context, the overall objective of the study is to develop an approach to the degree of media literacy of young people, men and women, no older than 21 years, who are undertaking their first year of undergraduate studies in public and private universities in 2015, from La Paz city, Bolivia, regarding mass and digital audiovisual media. This social group was selected because it is young people who are in the highest relationship with the media and because with this level of undergraduate allows to know the media literacy with which high school students graduate from secondary schools. The theoretical framework of the thesis is divided in two parts: one referring to Bolivia, in communication and education topics, and the other to the background, models of communication skills and nature of media literacy. The central theoretical design used for the thesis is proposed by Pérez- Tomero and Varis (2012), who divide in three the dimensions that make up media literacy: "Access and Use", "Critical Comprehension" and "Communication and Creativity". To those, the author of the research added other five dimensions, less important in qualitative and quantitative, from the reality in the context of the study. On this conceptual perspective, were defined the objectives, object of study, method and instrument of research, and the results and conclusions were ordered. The study was defined as exploratory-descriptive due to being new in the geographical location. The method used is a survey with a probabilistic sampling including 790 students, distributed among public universities and six private universities. It was difficult to obtain data of the number of students of private universities, in these entities and in the Ministry of Education, which hindered and delayed the investigation. For the measurement of media literacy, it was used the Likert scale. With the scale, a score to each question of the questionnaire was assigned, weighing the importance and value of the dimensions to be measured. The sum of these partial scores gives the total of 100 points; the score achieved by the young people depends on the proportion of correct and wrong answers they provide. The application of the instrument and the gathering of information were also hindered by the hermeticism of the universities, but the amount of planned questionnaires was successfully applied. After tabulating the collected information, the results of the research were elaborated, including the explanations and the respective scores. The main conclusion is that the degree of media literacy of students is 31.73% over 100%, corresponding to an unfavorable literacy, being in the range from 25% to 50%. Of the eight dimensions evaluated, the lowest score, in ascending order, are the knowledge of the features of the media context in Bolivia, with 21.8%; the "Access and Use", with 25.1%; the knowledge of developments in digital communication and its impact, with 26%; the "Communication and Creativity", with 26.3%; and the "Critic Comprehension", with 37.1%. The highest scores have to do with attitudes, like the agreement with the need to implement media education projects in the country (74%); that the communication media should contribute humanly in order to improve the living conditions of the population (49.5%); and personal self-assessment of young people in the sense that they make a deep analysis of media content (48.5%). The main limitations were: a local context that has not been worked through media education and literacy, with all that implies, and poor access to information of universities to develop research. The major implications of the study would be to make the importance of education and media literacy be valued in the Bolivian society and promote the formulation of projects in media education for diverse sectors of its population.