SACM - United States of America
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://drepo.sdl.edu.sa/handle/20.500.14154/9668
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Item Restricted THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS’ CREDIBILITY AND FOLLOWERS’ MOTIVATIONS IN SHAPING SAUDI CONSUMER BEHAVIOR(University of North Texas, 2024-05-28) Alenezi, Abdullah Heleil; Allen, JeffThe current study investigated the role of social media influencers’ credibility and followers’ motivations in shaping consumer behavior among Saudi consumers, focusing on key aspects of influencers’ credibility (expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness) and followers’ (consumers) motivations (information, socialization, and entertainment). The current study developed a framework to investigate how social media influencers’ credibility and followers’ motivations impact consumer purchase intention and consumer behavior, using the theory of reasoned action (TRA). The study employed quantitative research methodology, utilizing the Qualtrics platform to distribute online surveys to collect data. The study sample was 416 Saudi consumers. The study proposed a framework to describe the phenomena. The relationships were tested using liner multiple regression. SPSS software was employed for analysis of data including the demographic characteristics of participants. The study’s findings showed that in relation to the influencer’s credibility, the factors of trustworthiness and attractiveness had a statically significant and positive direct impact on purchase intention. However, expertise had a statistically insignificant negative impact on purchase intention. The findings showed that all the investigated factors of follower motivations, which include information, socialization, and entertainment, were statically significant and had a direct positive impact on purchase intention. The study offers significant insights into the connection between social media marketing influencers and consumer behavior, insights ultimately beneficial in the areas of both academic research and practical implications. These findings will enable marketers to optimize their strategies and improve their effectiveness within the Saudi market.39 0Item Restricted An Application of Uses and Gratification Theory Towards the Saudi Citizens' Motivations on Social Media to Consume News via Their Mobile Devices: A Survey of Al Madinah Community(Ohio University, 2024-05) Deen, Ahmed; Howard, SteveThis dissertation aims to better understand how Saudi citizens, particularly Al-Madinah citizens, consume their news via social media platforms. This dissertation employed the uses and gratification theory and adopted a quantitative method through the use of a descriptive online survey (Qualtrics) to answer the research questions and hypotheses. Therefore, snowball sampling tactics were used to reach 233 participants who received the questionnaire between January 15th, 2022, and July 15th, 2022. This dissertation's findings indicate two major motivations for news consumption: information seeking and personal preferences. This dissertation also finds that Saudis, particularly Al-Madinah citizens, tend to consume news via social media urgently, and they tend to consume their news about social events first, followed by the royal decrees' news, then sports news. Furthermore, this dissertation also finds that Saudi citizens in Al-Madinah prefer E-news accounts, which leads to a full belief in consuming news content that is quick, concise, and easy. The findings of this dissertation reveal that being updated about specific fields via specialized organization accounts on social media is a great encouragement for Al-Madinah citizens to consume news. Last, findings also reveal that citizens of Al-Madinah use (X)Twitter as their primary social media platform to consume news, followed by WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram.13 0Item Restricted The Role of Social Media Use Among Young Adults as it Relates to Fruits and Vegetables Intake and a Content Analysis of Fruits and Vegetables Videos on YouTube and TikTok(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-03-30) Nakshbandi, Sarah; Coccia, CatherineYoung adults have low fruits and vegetables intake, high use of social media, including YouTube and TikTok, and rely on social media to obtain nutrition information, which may affect food intake. This study examined the quality and reliability of fruits and vegetables videos on YouTube and TikTok using content analysis. A cross-sectional survey was also administered to young adults to examine the association between Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) constructs, including nutrition knowledge, social support, outcome expectation, reciprocal determinism, self-efficacy, and social media use on fruits and vegetables intake. Gender differences were also examined. The study analyzed 50 popular videos from YouTube and TikTok. Half of the YouTube videos were of good quality and reliability. Nearly half of TikTok videos were of moderate quality and poor reliability. Nutrition knowledge videos had the highest quality and reliability scores, 5 and 4, respectively. Online health organizations had minimal participation on YouTube. On TikTok, there were no nutrition knowledge videos, no videos from health organizations, and limited videos created by healthcare professionals. The study also included surveys with 275 young adults aged (18-30). Survey findings showed that higher reciprocal determinism, outcome expectations, and social support were correlated with higher self-efficacy to eat more fruits and vegetables (beta=.134, p=.052), (beta=.134, p=.022), and (beta=.421, p=<.001), respectively. Higher social media use was found to have an inverse relationship with self-efficacy to eat fruits and vegetables (beta=-.140, p=.010). Higher nutrition knowledge, self-efficacy, and social support were correlated with a higher daily intake of fruits and vegetables (beta=.149, p=.017), (beta=.269, p=<.001), and (beta=.287, p=.001), respectively. However, higher social media use was not correlated with a higher daily intake of fruits and vegetables (beta=.089, p=.157). There were no gender differences in social media use, self-efficacy, or total fruits and vegetables intake. Young adults' self-efficacy to consume fruits and vegetables may be negatively impacted by exposure to low-quality food content, like what was found on TikTok. These results may also indicate that social media use could be a useful nutrition education tool. Improved SCT constructs may assist young adults in enhancing their daily fruits and vegetables intake and self-efficacy. Further research is needed.23 0Item Restricted Investigating The Use Of Social Media In Relation To Cognitive Disabilities From The Arab Region(2023) Alshenaifi, Reem; Feng, Jinjuan; Nguyen, NamThis dissertation reports studies on social media usage in relation to cognitive disabilities from the Arab region. The first study investigated how social media is used in supporting and empowering Saudi caregivers of children with cognitive disabilities. Through interviews with 13 caregivers, we examined their motivations and concerns as well as the role of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that caregivers used social media with caution to seek information and emotional support, to spread awareness, and to communicate and build communities. The findings also suggest that caregivers face a great deal of challenges in security and privacy, social stigma and negative discussions, misinformation, as well as lack of resources. In the second study, we utilized text mining approaches, including sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to examine and understand how Arab users engage with Twitter to discuss cognitive disabilities. Content volume, temporal evolution, users, sentiment, topic discussed were iv analyzed. We applied Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) for sentiment analysis to identify the overall opinions and attitudes toward the researched neurological conditions. We also applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling to discover frequent topics in the collected dataset. Additionally, Gephi was used to map the interaction between users discussing cognitive disabilities on Twitter. The results provide new insights into public perspectives, which may assist interested entities to construct and distribute appropriate resources and information. In this dissertation, we presented the analysis techniques, discussed the findings, provided recommendations to interested stakeholders, and introduced potential opportunities and future directions.68 0Item Restricted Deep Learning Methods to Investigate Online Hate Speech and Counterhate Replies to Mitigate Hateful Content(2025-05-15) Albanyan, Abdullah; Blanco, Eduardo; Albert, MarkHateful content and offensive language are commonplace on social media platforms. Many surveys prove that high percentages of social media users experience online harassment. Previous efforts have been made to detect and remove online hate content automatically. However, removing users’ content restricts free speech. A complementary strategy to address hateful content that does not interfere with free speech is to counter the hate with new content to divert the discourse away from the hate. In this dissertation, we complement the lack of previous work on counterhate arguments by analyzing and detecting them. Firstly, we study the relationships between hateful tweets and replies. Specifically, we analyze their fine-grained relationships by indicating whether the reply counters the hate, provides a justification, attacks the author of the tweet, or adds additional hate. The most obvious finding is that most replies generally agree with the hateful tweets; only 20% of them counter the hate. Secondly, we focus on the hate directed toward individuals and detect authentic counterhate arguments from online articles. We propose a methodology that assures the authenticity of the argument and its specificity to the individual of interest. We show that finding arguments in online articles is an efficient alternative compared to counterhate generation approaches that may hallucinate unsupported arguments. Thirdly, we investigate the replies to counterhate tweets beyond whether the reply agrees or disagrees with the counterhate tweet. We analyze the language of the counterhate tweet that leads to certain types of replies and predict which counterhate tweets may elicit more hate instead of stopping it. We find that counterhate tweets with profanity content elicit replies that agree with the counterhate tweet. This dissertation presents several corpora, detailed corpus analyses, and deep learning-based approaches for the three tasks mentioned above.56 0Item Restricted THE SECURITY ASPECTS OF USERS’ INFORMATION SHARING ON SOCIAL MEDIA(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alharbi, Mohannad; Chen, Jiangping; Habib, Abdulrahman; Anderson, Rich; Herrington, RichardThis study aims to investigate college students’ security awareness of using social media in sharing information. The two theories that have guided this study are the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the technology acceptance model (TAM). Data was collected from both undergraduate and graduate students from the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton. The total responses included 380 students from different majors with 291 valid responses for data analysis; The structural equation model (SEM) Lavaan package was used to find out the best fit of the model. A diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS) was used to model the variables as ordinal in this study's analysis as ordinal data made the model fit substantially. The study found that 6 factors: attitude (AB), subjective norm (SN), perceived behavior control (PBC), perceived usefulness (PU), perceived risks (PR), and security awareness (SA) influenced behavior intention (BI). Also, I found that AB was influenced by PR and SA, as well as SN influenced by SA. Self-efficacy (SE) influenced PBC. On the other hand, the study found that controllability (C) did not influence PBC; perhaps, an individual’s skills do not interact with social media security settings. Perceived ease of use (PEOU) did not influence BI; perhaps this occurred because of an individual's inability to prevent his or her information from being disclosed in the future, even if they had taken the right precautions. This study contributed to literature on understanding the nature of information sharing among college students on social media. The results may help college security professionals to evaluate or revise the rules and policies regarding cybersecurity and privacy.36 0