King Abdulaziz University Students’ Awareness of the Impacts of Netflix Drama on their Behaviors and Attitudes towards the Boycott Campaigns

Abstract

: This study investigated the awareness of king Abdul-Aziz university students of the effects of watching Netflix drama on their personal behaviors and the Saudi society. It also highlighted the motivational factors cited by the participants for binge-watching Netflix drama. In addition, it pinpointed how far they are impressed by the ideas presented by Netflix drama. Moreover, it shed light on how far Saudi university students support the boycott campaign of Netflix. The study sample comprised 229 Netflix users from King Abdulaziz University. To collect the target data, the researchers designed and administered an electronic questionnaire through the WhatsApp application. Results obtained from questionnaire revealed that watching Netflix drama had negative effects of on the participants’ academic achievement as it had wasted a large amount of their time. They also showed that the motivations for watching Netflix were the participants’ interest in high quality movie shows with no advertisements and entertainment. These results adduce the importance of enhancing university students’ self-determination to empower them to gratify three basic psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness) which enable them to choose the useful media shows and avoid the undesirable consequences of binge-watching.