Online Opinion Expression about Women Serving as Judges among University Students in Egypt and Kuwait: An Integrative Study of the Spiral of Silence and Uses and Gratifications

Abstract

This study integrates the Spiral of Silence and Uses and Gratifications theories to examine the willingness of university students to express on Twitter their opinions about a controversial issue, women serving as judges in Kuwait and Egypt. The analysis of a survey of 640 respondents showed that they used Twitter for information seeking, opinion formation, opinion reinforcement, and social utility in discussions, and for its democratizing capability. Democratization was the only motive to predict the expression of opinion online. When the Kuwaiti and Egyptian samples were analyzed separately, the democratization motive predicted opinion expression for the Kuwaiti students but not for the Egyptian students. Interaction effects between motivations and size of the respondent's social network on Twitter were found to predict the online expression of opinion. For example, the variable assessing the size of a respondent's social network interacted with information seeking motivation and also with opinion reinforcement to predict opinion expression online.