The Impacts of Needs for Social Communication and Self-Satisfaction on Social Media Usage among Egyptian University Students

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلفون

1 PhD Researcher at the Faculty of Mass Communication- Cairo University

2 Professor in the Department of Radio and Television Faculty of Media – Cairo University.

3 Lecturer in the Department of Radio and Television, Faculty of Mass Communication, Cairo University.

المستخلص

Background. Mass media exhibited a huge power on people attitudes and behaviors. Many platforms were issued on the internet-based social media for audience in order to gratify their needs socially and psychologically. University students used to consume social media extensively for academic as well as non-academic objectives. Engagement within social media is usually driven by different motives such as social communications, keeping in touch, creating relations and for self-satisfaction. The present study was conducted on Egyptian university students to verify the impacts of needs for social communication and self-satisfaction on the usage of social media. applying “Use and Gratification theory” as a theoretical framework.
Method. A quantitative study on 200 participants applying self-rating questionnaires concerning two independent constructs (motive for social communications and motives for self-satisfaction) and one dependent construct (social media interaction) was employed. Four mediators (gender, the year of the study, the type of study and GPA ranks) were included. The survey’s questionnaires were distributed and collected through Google Forms and statistically analyzed by SPSS version 20 and StataMP software.
 Results. About 86.5% of students spent more than 2 hours per day on media platforms. WhatsApp was the most media site used by them particularly for communication and to keep-in-touch while X (Twitter) was the least platform to be used. Respondents valued the issues of privacy and credibility on social media. Findings regarding “Pearson’s correlation coefficients” and regression weights in “Structural Equation Modeling” demonstrated significant positive correlations and direct positive impacts of motives for social communications on social media interaction. However, a negative direct impact of motives for self-satisfaction on social media usage was observed. The “year of the study” demonstrated a negative indirect impact of social communication on social media interactions.
 Conclusion. Motives for social communications drove Egyptian university students to overuse social media. Motives for self-satisfaction shows no role on social media use. While “gender”, “type of the study” and “GPA ranks” revealed no indirect impacts, “the year of the study” established a negative indirect impact of the needs for social communication on the use of social media.
 

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