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1. Introduction
Moderate social media use can have a positive effect on students’ information acquisition, learning opportunities, confidence, interpersonal relationships and communication (Chae et al., 2018). Nevertheless, social media (SM) use can be problematic if it exceeds certain usage limits (Hsiao et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2017). SM, in this study, is defined as services provided through the Internet to enable users to communicate with others, exchange information and create content (Dewing, 2010). Dewing (2010) categorized SM into seven main types: blogs, Wikis, social bookmarking, social networking sites (for example, Facebook), status-update services (for example, Twitter), virtual world content and media-sharing sites (for example, YouTube and Instagram). However, this current study is specifically concerned with status-update services, social networking sites and media-sharing sites.
In Saudi Arabia, according to the Internet World Stats for 2021, around 72.3% of the population is active SM users. This current study has investigated SM usage and enquired whether it has any relationship with students’ attitudes towards using it in classroom activities. Moreover, this study has sought to establish whether this attitude could predict students’ attitudes towards using SM in their future careers. This is through using an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to gather detailed explanations. This study has especially sought to fill a gap in the literature by finding the relationship between SM usage, gender and type of college (i.e. study pathway).
Hence, this study could serve as a useful source of information for faculty members seeking to integrate SM into their curricula. It could also encourage students to activate SM in their learning and communication with teachers and peers, while at the same time reducing their non-academic SM usage. This study provides a scale for measuring students’ SM usage and attitudes towards undertaking classroom activities via SM in the Saudi context.
2. Literature review
The theoretical background of this study was informed by uses and gratification theory (Katz et al., 1973). The uses and gratification theory is based on five assumptions: (1) Users are active and goal-oriented in their media use; (2) Users need to take the initiative in selecting a specific medium to satisfy their needs; (3) Media compete with other resources to satisfy users’ needs; (4) Users have sufficient awareness of...