28
17.8% of respondents with no formal education going online, followed by 16.6% with primary education, 64.9% with secondary school education and 93.8% of respondents with tertiary education (Appendix 39).
There were notable differences in media use by ethnicity. Magazine readership was lower among Chinese respondents (39.5%), and internet use was lower among Indian respondents (49.1%). Malay respondents were inclined to read magazines and listen to the radio more than those of other ethnicities, at 60.2% and 79.8% respectively (Appendix 40).
Television has been a primary source of information through media for the Malaysian public since 1998, with more than 97.0% of respondents reported as watching it at least once a week except in 2008 (Figure 2-15). This was closely followed by newspaper readership, and lastly radio. From 1998 to 2014, subscriber numbers for the latter two types of media have been slowly decreasing. In comparison to 1998, newspaper readership has declined by 6 percentage points, while radio has declined by 4 percentage points. Interestingly, as internet usage grew over the years, radio and magazine usage levels also started to decline.
Figure 2-15: Source of Information through Media, 1998-2014
30
2.4.2 Internet Usage
The two top uses of the internet among respondents were communicating via social media and entertainment, at 86.2% and 67.3%, respectively. STI was ranked third with 59.2%, followed by email (56.4%) and education (51.9%). Religion was also a common topic for internet users at 42.0%. The least popular topics were politics and business, with only one in four Malaysians using the internet (Figure 2-16).
Figure 2-16: Internet Usage
2.4.3 STI related Places
In the survey, respondents were asked if they had visited various STI related places in the last 12 months. Besides the zoo, visited by 31.0% of respondents and museum visited by 22.7%
of respondents, there were fewer than 20.0% of respondents who had visited all other facilities mentioned (Figure 2-17).
By gender, differences in percentages were small for most online topics of interest to internet users, except for education. 60.5% of female respondents use the internet for education related searches, compared to one in two male respondents.
With reference to locality, a higher percentage of urban respondents used the internet for politics, email and business topics than in rural areas.
Social media was very popular with respondents in the children and youth groups, with nine out of ten respondents owning such accounts. For respondents in the youth group, four in every five respondents (79.9%) use the internet for entertainment, compared to 79.3% of respondents in the children’s group, and 62.9% of the adult group. Moreover, older respondents were more likely to use the internet for the following: email, religion, business and politics.
Generally, respondents with higher education levels were more likely to use the internet for more purposes than respondents with lower education levels. For respondents with no formal education, the internet was mainly used for two activities viz. entertainment (45.9%) and social media (44.7%).
For all ethnic groups, the two most common internet activities that the respondents engaged in were social media and entertainment.
Figure 2-17: Visit to STI related Places in Last 12 Months
32
There was little gender variation in visits to STI facilities. Overall for locality, more urban respondents had visited a STI related place within the last 12 months than rural respondents.
33.3% of urban respondents had visited a zoo compared to 24% of rural respondents.
When examined by age group, it was clear that the younger age groups had higher likelihoods of visiting STI related places in the last 12 months. The children’s group visited planetariums and PETROSAINS, almost 3 times more than the adult group.
In general, better educated respondents were more likely to have visited an STI related facility within the last 12 months. For example, only 15.0% of respondents with no formal education had visited a zoo compared to 37.9% for tertiary educated respondents. For ethnicity, more Malay and Indian respondents appeared to have visited at least one of the STI facilities compared to the Chinese and Other Bumiputera.
Compared to S&T surveys of previous years, museums and zoos were the more visited STI facilities amongst others. However, there has been a decrease in the number of visits to all STI facilities between 1998 and 2014. In previous years at least about 30.0% of respondents had visited the museum (Figure 2-18).
Figure 2-18: STI related Places Visited across 1998-2014
On further analysis it was found that the percentage of respondents who said they visited these STI facilities in the last 12 months has dropped. However, the reader must note that Malaysia’s Average Annual Population Growth Rate (AAPG) was about 1.5% since year 2000. Thus, the number of visitors for each facility may have increased in previous years to 2014, but, the growth rate of these visits for each of the facilities may be different from the population growth rate.
For instance the number of visitors recorded by the National Science Centre was 605,130 persons in year 2008 and 628,281 in 2013; the average growth rate was about 3.7%. However, the total population growth between 2008 and 2013 was about 7.5% (AAPG 1.5% x 5 years).
This means that although the visitors to the National Science Centre had increased, the visitor growth rate was still lower than the population growth rate. Therefore, on average, the proportion of the population who visited the facility has dropped.