Yeslam Al-Saggaf

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Charles Sturt University

Existing research on phubbing, or the act of looking at the smartphone while having a face-to-face conversation with others, highlighted a number of factors that could cause one to use their smartphone while having a face-to-face conversation with others including smartphone addiction, SMS (texting) addiction, social media addiction, Internet addic...

There is empirical evidence that people phub more frequently those who are closely related to them than those less close to them and that phubbing is not only transforming the norms of human communication but also this behavior has detrimental impacts on people. This review of the literature was undertaken to understand the impacts of phubbing on p...

Existing research on phubbing has focused mainly on one relationship group (i.e., partner phubbing). How does phubbing differ across different relationship groups (i.e., family vss people at work)? How does phubbing differ within the same relationship group (i.e., in the case of family relations: parents vs. children)? In which situations (i.e., in...

Phubbing is the act of momentarily engaging with the smartphone during face-to-face conversations. Past research on phubbing treated this behaviour as a stable disposition, rather than a temporary impulse and because of that, the predictors investigated to explain this behaviour were also trait predictors. The present study treated phubbing as a te...

Attending to the phone while interacting face-to-face with another person, a behaviour known as phubbing, can be detrimental to the phubbed person’s psychological wellbeing. Recent research revealed that phubbing friends and partners indirectly affected the phubbed individual’s wellbeing. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of child...

While existing studies explore smartphone privacy setting risks for adolescents, they provide limited insight into the role of gender in these dynamics. This study aims to enhance adolescents’ awareness of the security risks associated with smartphone privacy leakage by focusing on how a cyber safety intervention lesson can affect knowledge of smar...

Social media and smartphone use are strongly linked to users' emotional states. While numerous studies have established that fear of missing out (FOMO), boredom, and loneliness predict social media and smartphone use, numerous other studies have concluded that social media and smartphone use negatively impact these emotional states (i.e., FOMO, bor...

A richer approach to studying Decision Support System (DSS) interactions is required to understand and predict the nature of actual use in the workplace. We used questionnaire and interview techniques to examine workers’ experiences relating to DSS use in naturalistic settings. We aimed to: 1) Reveal what workers perceive to be the most important f...

Phubbing is so common that many probably think it is harmless. Past research found that phubbing partners indirectly affected their well-being. The current study was aimed at investigating whether phubbing friends is also indirectly related to their well-being. A total of 457 smartphone users attempted an online survey from which 202 complete respo...

This study examined whether participants’ adherence to an algorithmic aid was related to the degree of control they were provided at decision point and their attitudes toward new technologies and algorithms. It also tested the influence of control on participants’ subjective reports of task demands whilst using the aid. A total of 159 participants...

The vast majority of Australian children own a smartphone. High rates of smartphone ownership are associated with high rates of leakage of sensitive information. A child’s time and location patterns are enough to enable someone to build an accurate profile of the child. But children think that their devices already ensure that their sensitive infor...

Having highlighted in previous chapters specific effects of phubbing experienced by individuals in important relationships, namely children phubbed by their parents, partners phubbed by their loved ones, and employees phubbed by their supervisors as well as those who experienced being phubbed by friends and family, this chapter takes a broader look...

Scholars identified several predictors for phubbing behaviour, but addictions to smartphones, social media, the internet, gaming, and instant messaging, consistently held the highest predictive power for phubbing. Fear of missing out came in second spot, followed by personality traits, such as conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness...

This chapter examines the role of theory in phubbing behaviour. It first tries to see if technological determinism and mediation theory could serve as theoretical frameworks from within which phubbing as a behaviour could be better understood. But, then realises that social norms could shed more light on people’s motivation to engage in phubbing be...

Parents’ phubbing of their children is epidemic. The empirical evidence shows that parents’ phubbing can be extremely harmful to children. Ignoring children in favour of the smartphone can signal disinterest in them, heighten their feelings of rejection, and lower their feelings of being accepted by their parents. Parents’ phubbing can make childre...

The literature indicates that boss phubbing is becoming increasingly common in workplaces. The consequences of boss phubbing are severe, for both the business and staff well-being, with the loss of employees’ trust in their bosses, as a result of boss phubbing, being the often-cited negative consequence. Boss phubbing is linked with reducing job sa...

There is strong evidence that people are more likely to phub their partners than they would phub anyone else they encounter face to face, including their closest friends, other friends, siblings, children, parents, acquaintances, and even strangers in the street. But partner phubbing is associated with grave consequences, and not only for the relat...

Family and friends phubbing are neglected areas of research. The limited research available indicates that younger family members’ phubbing of older adults was interpreted to mean they were not significant in their younger family members’ lives and not deserving of their attention. Family phubbing increased loneliness and depression and decreased c...

This chapter looks at the relationship between the expression of positive and negative emotions in Twitter and users' network size. The questions that guided this study are: Do users who tweet twice or more “I am bored,” “I am excited,” “I feel lonely,” “I feel loved,” “I feel sad,” and “I feel happy” gain more followers and friends or lose them? D...

Photo sharing is one of the most popular online social media activities and has been associated with changes in mental health. Research investigating the effect of sharing photos on a social media user’s social connectedness, loneliness, and well-being has generated conflicting results. This study analyzed the effect of Instagram photo sharing on t...

Smartphone users on average spend three hours a day on social media. Research shows that state fear of missing out (state FoMo) is a strong predictor of state pubbing, which is the fleeting reaction in which a smartphone user momentarily engages with their smartphone while he/she is having a face-to-face conversation with another person or persons....

In this study, a data mining technique, specifically a decision tree, was applied to look at the similarities and differences between Islamists and Far Right extremists in the Profiles of Individual Radicalisation in the United States (PIRUS) dataset. The aim was to identify differences and similarities across various groups that may highlight over...

Previous research has found conflicting results whether social media photo-sharing actually improves or worsens social connectedness. This work explored relationships among social connectedness, photo-sharing and social rewards on the most used online photo-sharing platform, Instagram. The study focused on photo-sharing rather than the passive view...

Cyber-attacks are exponentially increasing daily with the advancements of technology. Therefore, the detection and prediction of cyber-attacks are very important for every organization that is dealing with sensitive data for business purposes. In this paper, we present a framework on cyber security using a data mining technique to predict cyber-att...

Photo sharing is one of the most popular online activities and prior research has revealed conflicting findings regarding its relationships with well‐being. While a number of studies have found sharing photos improves well‐being, other studies have found that photo sharing actually worsens well‐being. This research examined the relationship between...

Studies that examined the relationship between expressing feelings, such as feeling ‘bored’, ‘excited’, ‘lonely’, loved’, ‘sad’ and ‘happy’ and Twitter users’ network size (i.e. the number of friends and the number of followers) did not take into account the influence of other factors, such as the number of tweets, the number of lists and the numbe...

Existing research on phubbing focused mainly on the effect of phubbing on individuals’ wellbeing and social relationships. No published work has investigated in detail which apps are commonly used by smartphone users while having a face-to-face conversation with others and which demographic characteristics influences the choice of these apps. An on...

Phubbing is snubbing others during a face-to-face conversation by engaging with the smartphone instead of paying attention to them. The studies on phubbing focused mainly on the effect on relationships. This study addresses how often do smartphone users look at their smartphones while having a face-to-face conversation with others? Who do they phub...

The term "phubbing" describes individuals' engagement with their smartphones during face-to-face conversations. Because some scholars treated phubbing as a trait experience, the predictors they investigated to explain this behavior have also been trait predictors. This paper reports on a study that used the state phubbing scale, which took into acc...

The pilot state phubbing scale was adapted from Karadağ et al. [1] phubbing scale (see Appendix). Karadağ et al. [1] phubbing scale consists of eight items rated on a scale from 1 (never) to 5 (always). After the initial piloting of the adapted scale with several friends and relatives, the rating of the pilot scale was changed from 1 (never) to 5 (...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the design, application and findings of a case study in which the application of a machine learning algorithm is utilised to identify the grievances in Twitter in an Arabian context. Design/methodology/approach To understand the characteristics of the Twitter users who expressed the identified grieva...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the design, application and findings of a case study in which the application of a machine learning algorithm is utilised to identify the grievances in Twitter in an Arabian context. Design/methodology/approach To understand the characteristics of the Twitter users who expressed the identified grie...

What characterises social media radicals? And why some people become attracted to radicalisation? To explore answers to these questions, a number of tweets posted by a group of suspected radicals tweeting in Arabic were analysed using social network analysis and machine learning. The study revealed that these suspected radicals’ networks showed sig...

This chapter looks at the relationship between the expression of positive and negative emotions in Twitter and users' network size. The questions that guided this study are: Do users who tweet twice or more “I am bored,” “I am excited,” “I feel lonely,” “I feel loved,” “I feel sad,” and “I feel happy” gain more followers and friends or lose them? D...

This study looks into (1) the frequency with which Australian IT professionals compromise security to meet deadlines; (2) the causes of unprofessional behavior in the IT work place; (3) the best approach for tackling unprofessional behavior; and the effectiveness of this approach. These issues were addressed using a mixed research methodology that...

The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology to understand the grievances that radical groups could invoke to win the sympathy of youth, differentiate radicalised from non-radicalised individuals using signatures of personality and identify indicators of transition from radicalisation into extremism. The grievances of youth, techniques for ide...

Good governance from an ethical perspective in cyberdefence policy has been seen in terms of duty and consequentialism. Yet the negotiated view of virtue ethics can also address how nation states mitigate the risks of a cyber attack to their national interests and to prepare for a cyber offence in response to an attack. A discourse analysis of the...

Which ethical problems are most frequently experienced by ICT women professionals? Which ethical problems experienced by ICT women professionals are of most concern to them as individuals? A quantitative survey of 2,315 Australian ICT professionals of whom 15.4 percent were females revealed that the top 15 most frequently faced ethical problems tha...

Few studies have analyzed how women in Iranian communities use the internet. Our study investigates the effect of marital status and the presence of family dependents at home on their extent of internet use. Our analysis found that while higher incomes, having internet at home, being a student, and having higher qualifications can all increase Iran...

The aim of this study is to examine, from the perspective of Hyperpersonal Theory, the role of the communication components, sender, receiver, channel, and feedback, in the impression formation of matrimonial sites' (MSs) users. The study used a sample of Saudi Arabian users to also understand the role of their culture in this process. The findings...

Do information and communications technology (ICT) professionals who have ICT qualifications believe that the ethics education they received as part of their ICT degrees helped them recognise ethical problems in the workplace and address them? If they do, are they also influenced by their personal ethics? What else helps them recognise ethical prob...

The aim of this study is to examine bullying in the workplace from the perspective of Australian Information Communication Technology (ICT) professionals. The data collection for this project included conducting a quantitative survey with 2,315 participants and 43 qualitative interviews with members of Australian Computer Society (ACS). We found th...

This article theorises the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organised around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses...

The aim of this study was to determine whether Loneliness, Relationship Status and Profile Image are related to self-disclosure of Sensitive and Non-Sensitive Information on Facebook. To this end, 269 personal profiles of women who reported being Lonely and 269 profiles of women who reported not being Lonely were analyzed. Sensitive Information was...

What characterises social media radicals? And why some people become attracted to radicalisation? To explore answers to these questions, a number of tweets posted by a group of suspected radicals tweeting in Arabic were analysed using social network analysis and machine learning. The study revealed that these suspected radicals' networks showed sig...

While online social networks (OSNs) allow users to selectively share content as well as limit access to information within users’ own virtual spaces, unfortunately there is little or no control on other-generated content. The full study explores an interdependent privacy regarding other-generated disclosures on OSNs from insiders’ perspectives (the...

Emotions expressed in the online social media have an impact on the size of an online social network. Boredom is an emotion that can prompt users of social media to be more active in engaging with their online social network. However, there has been little research to draw attention to the relationship between feelings of boredom and the size of th...

The Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or the Religious Police as it is commonly known in the west, has dealt with 1834 incidents of women being blackmailed by men in 2014 and of those 22% (N= 403) were initiated using Social Network Sites (SNS). In light of the reality about these crimes, this study asked the f...

Do people who express negative feelings (loneliness, sadness) on Twitter gain or lose online contacts? To answer this question, we tracked the number of followers and followees of people who tweeted about loneliness or sadness twice; once when they expressed the negative feeling and a second time five months later. We compared the networks of those...

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non- human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses...

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses...

The aim of this study is to examine incompetence in the Australian ICT workplace from the perspective of Australian ICT professionals. The data collection for this project included conducting a quantitative survey, conducting qualitative interviews and conducting focus group discussions with key informants. Of the 2,315 respondents who participated...

Do people who express negative feelings (loneliness, sadness) on Twitter gain or lose online contacts? To answer this question, the authors tracked the number of followers and followees of people who tweeted about loneliness or sadness twice; once when they expressed the negative feeling and a second time five months later. The authors compared the...

Social networking users are presented with a plethora of profile and privacy settings; most of which are left defaulted. As a result, there is little understanding of the fields that make up the user profile, the privacy settings available to safeguard the user, and the ramifications of not changing the same. Concerns relating to the unprecedented...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) workplace. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a qualitative research methodology. A total of 43 ICT professionals were interviewed during the month of February 2014 in six Aust...

This study compared Twitter's content in Australia and Saudi Arabia using two different techniques, content analysis and thematic analysis. The exploratory findings have revealed that the tweets in the tags that trended in Australia were mostly relevant to the topic of the tag. The tweets in the tags that trended in Saudi Arabia, on the other hand,...

This article examines privacy threats arising from the use of data mining by private Australian health insurance companies. Qualitative interviews were conducted with key experts, and Australian governmental and nongovernmental websites relevant to private health insurance were searched. Using Rationale, a critical thinking tool, the themes and con...

Good governance from an ethical perspective in cyberdefence policy has been seen in terms of duty and consequentialism. Yet the negotiated view of virtue ethics can also address how nation states mitigate the risks of a cyber attack to their national interests and to prepare for a cyber offence in response to an attack. A discourse analysis of the...

ICT professionals need a way to understand the ethical challenges they face in the workplace. Having first identified common workplace challenges through an industry survey with 2,315 respondents, those challenges were further explored, as were solutions to them, through interviews with 43 participants in six Australian capital cities. Findings fro...

Większość badań w ramach współczesnej literatury skupia się na użytej przez badacza metodzie, ale nie na filozofii, która za nią stoi. W artykule tym opisujemy badanie etnograficzne, prowadzone w duchu paradygmatu konstruktywistycznego, którego celem było eksplorowanie zjawiska uczestnictwa w wirtualnych społecznościach w Arabii Saudyjskiej. Przeds...

This paper explores the potential of data mining as a technique that could be used by malicious data miners to threaten the privacy of social network sites (SNS) users. It applies a data mining algorithm to a real dataset to provide empirically-based evidence of the ease with which characteristics about the SNS users can be discovered and used in a...

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites (SNSs) such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users' movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google's Plus One button, Facebook's Like button, an...

This article explores the potential of data mining as a technique that could be used by malicious data miners to threaten the privacy of Social Network Sites (SNSs) users. It applies a data mining algorithm, specifically a clustering algorithm, to a hypothetical dataset to show the ease at which characteristics about the SNSs users can be discovere...

Purpose – The aim of this study is to examine interpersonal trust in Muslim matrimonial sites (MMS) from a male perspective. Specifically how users perceive interpersonal trust in MMS; what are the signs of lack of trust in MMS (if any); and what strategies do users adopt to handle the lack of trust in MMS. Design/methodology/approach – This empir...

Information is shared online while users browse on the Internet. This information is being leaked from first party or visited sites to third party sites (such as advertisers) in a number of ways, including in HTTP headers. In this paper, we analysed HTTP headers resulting from browsing activities and reported on the types of information being leake...

This exploratory study compares and contrasts two types of critical thinking techniques; one is a philosophical and the other an applied ethical analysis technique. The two techniques analyse an ethically challenging situation involving ICT that a recent media article raised to demonstrate their ability to develop the ethical analysis skills of ICT...

This article explores the potential of data mining as a technique that could be used by malicious data miners to threaten the privacy of SNS users and makes a moral case for the users’ right to privacy. It applies a data mining algorithm to a hypothetical dataset developed for the purpose of this article, to show the ease at which characteristics a...

The article reports on an empirical study conducted in 2009 which used ethnographic techniques to collect the data. The study aim was to provide a rich description about the experiences of young Saudi females on Facebook. To report the perceptions of these females in relation to their experiences on Facebook, the author conducted 15 semistructured...

This article explores the digital divide in four Asian countries: Yemen, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China. The research the article reports on is done by researchers who come from these countries making it possible to ground the results of this study within the context of those studied. To allow the reader the opportunity to see the results of this r...