An Investigation of the Adoption of Social Media Applications by Faculty Members at a Prominent University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Abstract
A report by Hootsuite (2018) stated that the average time of daily use of
social media applications by Saudis in 2017 was two hours and 34 minutes. Even
though statistics show that social media applications are very widespread among
students, they also suggest that these media are not being utilized by many faculty
members for teaching and learning purposes. The purpose of this study was to
investigate the factors that influence the adoption of social media applications for
teaching and learning purposes by faculty members at a prominent university in
Saudi Arabia.
The Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB) was used as this
study’s theoretical framework. These factors included: Actual Use, Behavior
Intention, Attitude (Compatibility, Ease of Use, Usefulness), Subjective Norm
(Peer Influence, Superior Influence, Student Influence), Perceived Behavioral
Control (Self-efficacy, and Facilitating Conditions). Additional research factors include selected demographic and experiential factors from the literature, notably
gender, age, and academic field.
A survey research approach was used.
The researcher developed an instrument to measure the DTPB factors. All
faculty members at a university in the west region of Saudi Arabia were invited to
participate. The invitation emails were sent through the Deanship of Information
Technology. A total of 246 responses were received, of which 194 were complete,
and 186 were both complete and valid.
Overall, the result of the correlational analysis for Research Question 2
showed that Behavior Intention had a significant positive correlation with the
Actual Use (r (176) = 0.903, p < .01). For Research Question 3, the results of the
hierarchical regression analysis, as well as the path analysis, indicated that Attitude
was found to be the strongest predictor of Behavior Intention (R2 = .819, F(1, 168)
= 668.89, p = .000), while Perceived Behavioral Control, Subjective Norm, and the
other demographic and experiential factors were not.
For Research Question 4, the results of the hierarchical regression analysis,
as well as the path analysis, indicated that Attitude was found to be the strongest
predictor of Actual Use (R2 = .767, F(1, 168) = 544.973, p = .000), while Perceived
Behavioral Control, Subjective Norm, and the other demographic and experiential
factors were not. The additional analysis provided some deeper insight onto the factors that
comprise Attitude. The results of this additional analysis indicated that Perceived
Usefulness and Compatibility were two dimensions of Attitude that made large,
significant contributions to the prediction of Behavior Intention and Actual Use.
Finally, recommendations and implications are provided for university
administrators.