The Role of Social Media Influencers in Shaping Food Awareness and Dietary Behavior among the Emirati Audience: A Field Study on Citizens of Al Ain City

This study aims to investigate the role of social media influencers in shaping food awareness and dietary behavior among the Emirati audience, drawing on media dependence theory and employing a public survey methodology through the administration of a questionnaire to a purposive sample of Emirati citizens in Al Ain City who follow influencers to obtain information on healthy nutrition. The findings revealed that more than (79.3%) of the sample members rely on social media influencers to obtain information on healthy nutrition at a moderate-to-high degree, with "the ease of rapid access to food-related information" emerging as the leading reason for this reliance, while "weight-loss dietary regimens" topped the list of the most-followed topics. With regard to the roles analyzed, the affective role recorded the highest arithmetic means at a high level, followed by the cognitive role, and then the behavioral role, reflecting the difficulty of translating awareness into actual behavior. At the hypothesis-testing level, the results indicated that age is the most influential demographic variable, as it produced statistically significant differences in the degree of reliance and in the three roles. Furthermore, positive correlations were confirmed between the degree of reliance and the three roles, as well as among the roles themselves.