Policy Integration in Digital Governance: Faculty–Student Perceptual Incongruence on Social Media Risks in Vietnam
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33152/jmphss-10.5.7Keywords:
Policy integration, Digital governance, Perceptual incongruence, Student participation, Policy effectivenessAbstract
Vietnamese universities address social-media risks through several overlapping policy domains, including cybersecurity, digital transformation, student affairs, and civic and political education. Formal overlap, however, does not ensure coherent implementation or shared assessments of the risks students encounter online. This article examines whether perceived policy integration is associated with smaller faculty/staff–student perceptual distances, whether larger perceptual distances are associated with lower reported policy effectiveness, and whether student participation moderates that association. The analysis uses a cross-sectional parallel survey of 584 respondents from selected Vietnamese universities, including 291 faculty/staff and 293 students. Four matched risk-domain items were converted into respondent-level, group-referenced absolute-distance indicators by comparing each respondent’s score with the mean score of the opposite respondent group in the analytic sample. No one-to-one faculty–student matching was used. Reliability analysis, EFA, CFA, covariance-based SEM, moderation analysis, and robustness checks were conducted. Perceived policy integration was negatively associated with perceptual incongruence (β = −0.415, p < 0.001), whereas perceptual incongruence was negatively associated with reported policy effectiveness (β = −0.326, p < 0.001). Reported student participation was positively associated with policy effectiveness (β = 0.381, p < 0.001), and the positive PG × SP coefficient (β = 0.148, p < 0.001) was consistent with a weaker negative PG–PE association at higher levels of participation. Within this purposive cross-sectional sample, implementation coherence and participation were associated with smaller cross-group perceptual distances and higher reported policy effectiveness. The findings should be interpreted as respondent-level associations, not as causal effects or disagreement within matched faculty–student pairs.
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