Assessing the Use of Social Media as a Source of Information Related to Dentistry in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The term social media usually refers to Internet tool that allows communication between individuals, and enables them to share information, opinion, photos, videos, and other content . 1 Social media, offering a public reservoir of information, may serve as a source of patient information to aid clinical care. 2 Patients are increasingly active online, and they are frequent social media users for health purposes.In Saudi Arabia, social media and technology is increasingly popular, mostly due to the low average age of the country's population.3 The aim of this study is to assess the use of social media of Saudi population, and to assess which social media platform are used more often.In addition to the use of social media as source of information that are related to dentistry in Saudi Arabia with the associated factors. Material and method:The study used an Internet-based Arabic language questionnaire, with participants self-recruited by snowball sampling via social media networking sites.Our study was aimed at all residence in Saudi Arabia above 18 years of age who could be accessed through social networking sites.Results: A total of 1030 responses were received, where females constituted 80.5% (860) of the total respondent.The age range of the majority of the survey respondent's was from 29-39 years old (39.9%), followed by 34.3% at the age range of 18-28 years, 17.2% were at the age range of 40-50 years and the least were above 50 years of age represented with 8.6%.Around ninety eight percent of the respondents reported that they are using or browsing social media websites and 92.2% reported that they have personal accounts on the social media.About fifty eight percent of the respondents reported that they search on social media if they faced any dental issue, and 68.6% of them stated that they usually find the information they were looking for.Conclusion: Social media is bringing a new dimension to the health care area by offering a medium to be used by patients, and health care professionals.These networks are bringing health information to many more people than ever before.And they are widening access to those who may not easily access health information via traditional methods, such as younger people, minorities, and lower socioeconomic groups.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.