The role of social media in enhancing awareness in legal rights for women’s empowerment in rural areas of Jordan

The current study attempts to explore the level of the effect of the role social media plays in increasing the awareness of the legal rights of women living in rural Jordan. It also endeavors to highlight the role of social media in increasing women empowerment living in rural Jordan. A quantitative approach was used to answer the questions of the study. A descriptive analytical approach was used through a quantitative method. A group of females were interviewed about women's rights to help design and develop the questionnaire. The questionnaire was divided into three main parts. The first part aimed to collect the demographic data of the respondents. In the second part, the respondents were asked to respond to 19 points related to the rights of females using a 5-point Likert scale. These points were categorized into five main categories of women's rights: civil, political, economic, and cultural. The third part consisted of three open-ended questions for the respondents to answer related to women's empowerment. To help design the questionnaire, 20 females living in rural areas in Jordan were interviewed. They were chosen through the convenience sampling technique nominated by women leaders who work in networks and organizations related to women empowerment. The sample for answering the questionnaire, the quantitative approach, was chosen by a convenience sampling technique that consisted of 600 females/ women in rural areas all around Jordan. But only 460 female/ women responded. The study concluded that women have known and learned about their rights, whether civil, political, economic, social, or cultural, from different social media platforms, but especially Facebook. Moreover, this fact does not only relate to women who are not employed or educated. This conclusion can also apply to educated and employed women in rural regions in Jordan. The study also concludes with the importance of social media in increasing women's empowerment in different ways, such as learning from other women's experiences, and others. There is a lack in the studies that tackle the role of social media in women's empowerment and especially in spreading legal literacy among women in Jordan's rural regions. The current study filled the gap in this area.