“Where Are You?” The Communicative Functions of Saudi Students’ Text Messaging

Abstract

The widespread use of the mobile phone service has greatly contributed to the proliferation of text messaging, particularly among young people. The main objective of this study is to examine the communicative functions of the text messaging of young Saudi university students. Thurlow's (2003) theoretical framework is used in this study. The study has a straightforward research question: What are the communicative functions of young Saudi students' text messaging? 750 text messages were collected from the participants. The data collected were coded based on their communicative functions. Five main categories of communicative functions emerged from the data, namely friendship maintenance, socialization, school collaboration, coordination, and exchange of information. The findings of the present study corroborate previous findings about communicative functions in text messaging.

Informational features of WhatsApp in everyday life in Madrid: An exploratory study

“…This category includes messages about mood or feelings, personal news that have significantly affected the individual, or the search for emotional support. It had already been pointed out in relation to WeChat [22] and WhatsApp [61], and even in relation to the use of SMSs among Saudi students, applications that in the past shared many of the characteristics obtained now with MIMs [11]. The interviews with…”

“…The analysis revealed that the main function was friendship maintenance. In this category, the users usually seek help and emotional support from their social circle [11].…”

“…This category includes messages about mood or feelings, personal news that has significantly affected the individual, or the search for emotional support. It had already been pointed out in relation to WeChat [22] and WhatsApp [61], and even in relation to the use of SMSs among Saudi students, applications that in the past shared many of the characteristics obtained now with MIMs [11]. The interviews with WeChat users showed that one type of interaction in this application was sympathetic companionship, defined by the author as a form of communication in which people seek psychological or emotional support from others [22], a category that is the same as the personal affective information in our sample.…”

“…The analysis revealed that the main function was friendship maintenance. In this category, the users usually seek help and emotional support from their social circle [11]. These kinds of messages have the same characteristics as the personal affective information between users from Madrid, but in our sample they are not so frequent because users prefer to communicate relevant events face-to-face or by phone.…”

“…Although WhatsApp is currently considered the main messaging app for smartphones -by the end of 2017, it had up to 1.5 billion active monthly users [10] -its study had usually been restricted to the analysis of the communicative roles it played among young people from Asia [11] and America [12], or to the study of its informative use in certain fields of knowledge, such as health [13,14], education [15,16], and to a lesser extent in relation to documentation [17] and journalism [18,19]. Regarding the types of groups analysed, there are a large number of student groups [20,21,22] and groups of professional teams [23,24], but friend and family groups [3,25] have rarely been studied.…”