Saudi Women Online Practices on Social Media Platforms: A Qualitative Multi-Method Study

This study is a part of an ongoing PhD research into Saudi women’s online practices across a number of social media platforms (SMP) (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). The focus of this thesis is first to discover Saudi women’s online practices across different SMP, and second, to explore the relationship between these practices and Saudi women’s identities. A qualitative multi-method approach is adopted, including online observations and semi-structured interviews. Following purposive and snowballing sampling, twelve Saudi women from different cities in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dammam) participated. Initial findings indicate that (a) Saudi women’s online practices vary across SMP by appropriating platforms’ features and affordances, (b) SMP are used as spaces where Saudi women cautiously manage contexts’ collapse and divide with different audiences across SMP, and (c) Saudi women’s online practices have reshaped their offline identity and vice versa, and Saudi women’s offline identities are represented online as a part of their online identities. Though there is a growing body of literature in HCI, CHI, and CSCW in social media studies within the Arab and Gulf regions (GCC), there is little research addressing Saudi women’s online practices on SMP in particular. Therefore, this study aims to make a novel contribution to the field of socio-technological integration, and particularly how cultural contexts shape technology adoption, to help form a greater understanding of the challenges involved