The Effectiveness of Social Media on Engineers Related Tasks

Article Info Abstract Article History Received Nov 12, 2021 Revised Nov 24, 2021 Accepted Nov 26, 2021 In the beginning of 21st Century, Social Media developed and influenced on all aspects of modern lifestyle. Nowadays, Social Media is not only an entertainment and social networking tool, but also can be supposed as a way of linking different businesses, marketing, management, construction industry. Furthermore, it provides a framework for people around the world to interconnect, share information, and interrelate with each other. This study includes an investigation about the effects of Social Media on engineering related tasks, for this purpose, a questionnaire survey was performed for engineers with different gender, ages, and engineering status. Kurdistan Region-Iraq is the case study of this survey, the results of this study reveal that Social Media is one of the mostly used by engineers. It is also illustrated that Google, YouTube and Facebook are the mostly used platforms.

Others like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Google, and Pinterest are also used at a smaller percentage.
Moreover, SM is now proving to be having commercial potential for businesses to use more than being a personal entertainment medium. However, within the construction field, the implementation of SM is not explored in-depth [9]. According to previous studies, [15][16][17] it is explored that engineers mainly retrieve information through face-to-face meeting with their colleagues when searching for information. Although email is still the widely used channel [18].
Engineers primarily depend on their colleagues and people they can easily reach for information seeking and sharing of knowledge. However, the progress in technology changed this work path and now SM can be supposed to be an obvious choice [8]. Additionally, Sarka et al [8] [19].
Although studies have revealed the use and benefits of SM in different aspects of life, away from leisure and personal sharing, there is still some gap to be found regarding the relationship between SM and engineers. This research is about exploring the common platforms that engineers use, and types of SM activities that are mostly dependent on achieving information in this area.

Experimental Methodologies
In order to investigate the effectiveness of social media (SM) on engineers related tasks, questionnaire form was conducted which includes a number of important questions. The statistical analysis has been done to the obtained results by using SPSS software. The detail information about the investigation in separate sub-sections such as study site, participants, sample sizing is illustrated.

Study Site
The research was performed in Kurdistan Region-Iraq (KRI) which is situated precisely at latitude 36.4103° N, and longitude 44.3872° E. Exclusion criteria for participants were as follows: they had to be engineers and reside in the Kurdistan Region. Anyone with these details is qualified to take part in this survey.

Participants and Sample Size Technique
In 2020, the population of KRI engineers was estimated to be 20,419 people, with an overall Iraqi population [20]. In this case, the following formula for calculating the necessary sample size for this study will be sufficient. [21]: Where n = required sample size, N= population size, and d= margin of error (considered d= 0.05) [22]. The formula stated that about 392 samples would be sufficient for this study, and a simple random sampling technique was used due to the sample size allocated by taking the population in KRI into account [23]. This cross-sectional and quantitative research was performed from 18 January 2021 to 01 February 2021.

Questionnaire Design and Data Collection
The current study aimed to learn more about the impact of SM on engineer careers and potentiality.
Also, show how the results have an unintended consequence. Primary data was collected using the standardized questionnaires created after a review of the literature [8]. A self-administered online questionnaire was used in this cross-sectional study. The questionnaire was created with Google Forms, a free electronic medium provided by Google, in order to collect information voluntarily through the designed questionnaire. naire, and the relation between the items was studied before distributing the questionnaire.

Statistical Analysis Instrument
The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26.0 was used for all statistical analyses. The software analyzed the percentage and frequency, as well as the Cross tabulation is a method for quantitatively analyzing the relationship between multiple variables. Cross-tabulation, also known as contingency tables or cross tabs, groups variables in order to understand the relationship between them [24].

Ethical Considerations
The study was reviewed and approved by University of Raparin and Tishk International University-Sulaimani research center.

Results and Discussion:
This section contains summaries of participant responses to each of the questions posed about the relationship between SM and engineering tasks. The explanations and debates for each question's responses can be found in the sub sections below.

Socio-Demography Characteristics of Responders'
To investigate the effectiveness of SM on engineer's related tasks, several questions were asked the participants. Engineering status is another aspect of the distribution. However, engineering students use SM with 64.5%, but fresh and experienced engineers are using it with above 70% ratio. On the other side, Students use of research articles is dominant. Additionally, there is a vast difference from the rest two in using university lecture notes with 70.9%.
According to a survey of nearly 1,500 engineers by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), demonstrates that engineers are not only using SM for personal reasons, but they're seeking out information related to their professional fields [25].  Engineers of age (under 25) are mostly interested in the discussion between engineers on a specific topic shared post, as shown in Table 4. Moreover, online courses are disproportional with age; young engineers (under 25) are the most interested in online courses with a rate of 34.2% of participants.
In 2016, a survey of over 1,000 engineers about their information habits, including SM. Approximately 40% said that they use SM as a source of engineering information. The respond of 42% of the users are reading work-related articles that appear in their personal feed. In addition of 23% that they search or share information with professional contacts [24]. and professional abilities to earn more jobs and money. The most important conclusions which gained though results are; it is noteworthy that SM is the most common and the most popular sources of seeking information.
Regarding to engineering status of the participants, it can be found that 70% of the fresh and experienced engineers are using SM, while about 64.5% participants who are engineering students. The results of the question concerning the types of used SM, illustrate that the top used platforms by engineers are Google, YouTube and Facebook respectively. Moreover, Posts in text format and sharing related videos are the most attractive part of SM by engineers. The vast majorities of the participants emphasized that SM has the time facility to obtain specific information in a short time. In addition, the outcomes regarding to economical support show that, the SM could not be an appropriate financial support for engineers.
Based on obtained findings we propose following up by investigating the implications of the SM for the engineering design process and exploratory in detail how engineers assess the reliability of identified information and knowledge. Moreover, it can be suggested for the future study to work on how to establish engineering platforms from SM such as Google, YouTube and Facebook. Moreover, the study can also suggest investigations on how to control the quality of the published knowledge in terms of referenced and updated sources.

Declaration of Competing Interest:
The authors declares that they have no conflict of interest.