Effects of Media Uses for Candidate Public Relations toward Voters’ Decision Making - Case Study: Bangkok Major Election in 2022

Abstract

Bangkok had been in vacancy from Mayor Election for 9 years. On 22^nd May 2022, there was the first Mayor Election since then. 30 candidates employed various types of public relations media to reach their target audience. This research aims: (1) to observe and gather the types of public relations media of candidates used in the election, (2) to survey the efficiency of the media toward the decision making of the voters, and (3) to compare the efficiency of the public relations media toward the voters in 3 generations.

            This research employed sequential mixed method. The types of media used were gathered by the qualitative method – non-participation observation. Then, the survey questionnaire was generated to collect the data in quantitative method. The samples were 474 Bangkok voters (n = 474), segmented into 3 generations: Generation X 204 people, Generation Y 210 people, and Generation Z 60 people. The analytical methods were in both descriptive and inferential statistics – One-Way ANOVA and t-test.

The results revealed that there were 24 types of the media used for public relations, categorized into 5 categories; person as medium, mobile media, print media, television media, and online media. In online media, there were 3 subcategories; owned media, earned media, and paid media. After ranking the efficiency of the media toward the decision making of the voters, the largest to the smallest efficient media were television media, person as medium, online media, print media, and mobile media. Even all 3 generations gave the same trends of thought, the details were found difference. 4 out of 5 groups of the media showed the significant statistical differences at p-value level of .05 toward the decision making. Television media affected Generation Z more than Generation Y and X; online media affected Generation Y more than Generation Z and X; while print and mobile media affected Generation X more than Generation Y and X. Meanwhile, there was no significant difference in person as medium reported from those 3 Generations